“In the case of the national calorie menu labeling law, the extent of reformulation is not known,” Micha said. Under the assumption that restaurants on average tweaked their recipes to make them five percent less calorie-heavy, the estimated impacts of the labeling law are doubled.
There’s another, less obvious benefit to calorie labeling, researchers said: When restaurants are forced to be transparent about the nutrition content in their products, they’re incentivized to make their menu healthier. It is important to acknowledge that calories are not the only element that defines if a food is healthy or not, but it is a good proxy.”
“So being faced by calorie information tells us with more accuracy how healthy (or not) is a food item. “All of us choose what to eat every single day but research has found that average people and even nutrition professionals systematically underestimate how many calories food has,” says Rodrigo Aranda, a policy research associate at Georgia State University who focuses on health economics. Proponents of calorie labeling point out that we are all terrible at estimating how many of them our food contains. Quite the bang for one’s buck, you might argue. The country, as a whole, would save another $12.71 billion in costs associated with driving to doctor’s offices, waiting in waiting rooms, and literally doing anything else, including work. Over the model’s lifetime, researchers found that the estimated drops in heart disease and type 2 diabetes could save Americans $10.42 billion dollars, which includes the price of medical care and treatment. This week’s study demonstrates that the cost of printing new menus might turn out to be a steal. The restaurant industry- particularly the pizza lobby-fought long and hard to jettison the rule, arguing that it would be expensive for businesses to implement. (The national rule was preceded in some locales by regional requirements, including in New York City, King County in Washington state, and California.) It mandates that all restaurants with 20 or more locations list calorie counts on menus and make other nutrition information, such as sugar, fat, and cholesterol content, available upon request. But that’s nearly impossible to do when it comes to nationwide food standards, such as the calorie labeling rule.Įnacted in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, calorie labeling didn’t take effect until May of 2018. The “gold standard” of research involves randomly selecting participants and subjecting them to different experiences in controlled settings. The idea is that it’s pretty normal to, say, treat yourself to an extra handful of Goldfish during the day if you chose morning oatmeal over a bacon-egg-and-cheese.Īs you’re probably thinking, there’s room for some error in these kinds of forecasts. To be realistic, they also factored in the prediction some eaters make up about half of that deficit at some later point in the day. Based on previous calorie labeling studies, they estimated that people ate about 20 fewer calories per day when calorie counts were available. Extending the model’s time period from five years to a lifetime, calorie labeling could avert 136,000 cases of heart disease and almost 100,000 cases of type 2 diabetes. The study’s authors drew their estimates from a population modeling tool, which allows researchers to predict the impact of a given health policy based on a demographically representative sample of the country. “We need such evidence to inform policy action and bring about much-needed change within our food systems.” “Such long-term and nationally representative studies provide evidence in support of the cost-effectiveness of food policies to improve diets and population health and curb staggering healthcare costs,” said Renata Micha, study co-author and associate professor of nutrition at Tufts University. To put a number on it: The study’s authors estimate that healthier choices guided by calorie labeling could add 8,700 combined life years to the general population.
And as these momentary, meal-by-meal, day-by-day decisions are aggregated across the entire country and multiple years, they could lead to a measurable increase in our collective quality of life. These estimates are based on the idea that some eaters, when informed of how much energy different menu items contain, order different options instead. In as little as five years, calorie labeling on menus could help the country avoid more than 14,000 new cases of heart disease, and over 21,000 new cases of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
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