Fast Food Calorie Guidelines Backfire: People Eat More
According to an American Journal of Public Health’s recent study, calorie guidelines, put in place to help educate people on the number of calories they should eat, don’t truly do the job they were meant to do.
Calorie guidelines, required in several states and cities in the United States, were designed to help people make better food choices and cut back on overconsumption. Congress is pushing for more calorie labeling in order to support health care reform, however, the effort may be futile.
Previous studies support the fact that listing calories has not done much for reducing America’s expanding waistlines. Fast food and restaurant food is extremely high in calories, and the industry has done very little to improve the nutrient value of their food. At present, almost one-quarter of our population eats fast food two or more times each week.
The most recent study’s author states that not much has changed since fast food outlets began providing calorie information to customers. She feels that the problem may rest in the fact that customers do not actually understand how to apply the information to their lives, without additional guidance. Perhaps eating a 1,000 calorie lunch seems perfectly normal to most people.
New York is one of the cities that requires calorie information about each item to be posted on menus. To test if teaching people how to use caloric intake information made any difference, a test of McDonald’s customers was conducted where one third were given a flyer that said women and men should limit their daily calories to between 2,000 and 2,400 per day, another group got flyers saying that a single meal should have no more than 800 calories, and a final group was given no information as all.
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Source: http://www.riseearth.com/2013/07/fast-food-calorie-guidelines-backfire.html
