According to this piece, chain restaurants will soon be including nutritional info (like calorie counts) on their menus. I am of two minds on this. I think it'll do some people a world of good to know what they're putting in their pieholes but I'm uncomfy at this being government-decreed. Some gov't intrusions into our lives seem logical and justifiable but this one…I don't know about it…
Back when I had a serious weight problem, it helped me a lot to start reading up and finding out how many calories were in things I ate. I found many situations where there would be two foods I liked equally but one would have 350 calories and the other would have 800. It was pretty easy to knock some calories out of my intake by just opting for the former.
A lot of folks really don't know. I had my Gastric Bypass Surgery at the same time 'n' place as a lady who has become an e-mail buddy. On operation day, she weighed the same as I did but she was a foot shorter…and since I had a problem, you can imagine what hers was like. As we chatted about Things We'd Tried before resorting to surgery, she said, "My problem was that I saw that the Lean Cuisine lasagna had only 320 calories and I guess I convinced myself that all lasagna, in any portion size, was low in calories." It was easy to indulge in that self-deception in restaurants where there was no label to tell her otherwise.
It really has helped me to look up the nutrition info for restaurants where I'd be dining but it isn't always easy or convenient. Most chains have it on their websites but some hide it well…or they make it more complicated to access by constructing it as an interactive game where you put certain items on a cyber-tray to get a breakdown of carbs and protein and fat grams. Obviously, it's not always possible to research in advance when you dine, either because you don't know that far ahead where you'll be eating or because non-chains (i.e., most restaurants) don't supply the data.
The proposed law only applies to chains with twenty or more outlets and that won't include many places I eat…but it'll help in some and I'm hoping it will become so standard that all eateries will stick those numbers on their bills of fare. When you're at the Olive Garden trying to decide between the Linguine alla Marinara and the Chicken Parmigiana, it might be relevant to know that one has 660 calories more than the other.
I'm curious as to how much, if at all, having that info on the menu right there under your taste buds will affect what gets ordered. Will we see the high-calorie items decline in popularity to the point where less of them are offered? Probably not. This is, after all, the nation that invented the deep-fried Twinkie and the six-buck everything-in-the-world-on-it burger at Carl's Jr. But I think it'll have some positive effect.
And still, despite that belief, I'm not sure it's the government's business to make it mandatory.