Calorie counts on fast food menus? California law would require it
Advocates say SB 1420 would help fast-food eaters make slimmer choices. Others doubt the information will have an effect.
No one's looking to make you go on a diet. But there's a law in the works in Sacramento that might -- just might -- help you lose weight -- or so says a study released Thursday.
The proposed law, SB 1420, which the state Senate has passed and the Assembly will consider soon, would require chain restaurants with 15 or more outlets in California to list the calorie content for each item on their menus and menu boards. (The menus would also include other nutritional information, such as grams of fat and carbohydrates.)
Advocates believe such a "menu-labeling law" could help to halt, or at least slow, the trend that has led to 3 out of 5 Californians being overweight or obese. The new study -- by the Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley -- is the latest evidence suggesting they may be right.
By the researchers' calculations, if the law were in effect, adult fast-food customers might, on average, end up weighing nearly 3 pounds less after a year, thanks to having eaten 9,300 fewer calories.
Even if only 80% of the customers see the calorie information, "That adds up to 40 million pounds in the state of California," says Dr. Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy in Davis, which published the study on its website.
Other health experts are less sure what the law would do to Californians' waistlines. On the one hand, they say, a hefty number of studies augur well for the law's success: studies that show just how much fast food people eat, and studies that show how badly people -- even nutrition mavens -- underestimate calorie content when left to do the math themselves.
"People are notoriously inaccurate," says Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University in New Haven.
Still, there's no definitive proof that the law will make people cut calories -- the kind of proof that could only come from a controlled study of what happens after a law of this sort goes into effect.
"The law is a reasonable thing to try," says James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado. "You could argue that this is just what people are needing, that when they have this information, they'll make all the right choices. Or you could argue that people already know they're doing the wrong things, but they do them anyway."
