The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is requiring chain restaurants to post nutrition information on menu boards–not just calories, as in New York, but also fat, carbohydrates, and sodium. Carbohydrates but not sugars? All that? It will be interesting to see how this works in six months when the rule goes into effect.
So many people have sent me news about the proposed legislation in Mississippi to ban overweight people from eating in restaurants that I must say something about it. I thought it was a joke, but no such luck. The bill truly exists. Nobody expects it to get anywhere but I still think it’s bad public policy. For one thing, I still remember lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement, plenty of them in Mississippi. For another, this won’t fix the environment to make it easier people to eat more healthfully. Here are some alternative suggestions: How about requiring restaurants to give a price break for smaller portions or making smaller portions and healthy kids’ meals the default?
I’m just getting caught up with the Wall Street Journal’s report on calories in “low-calorie” meals served in chain restaurants. It’s worth a look. The reporter sent meals to a laboratory to test for calories. The good news: most calorie contents were as advertised. The not so good news: the calories are as advertised if–and only if–you don’t eat side dishes or additions like bread, cheese, or salad dressing. If you do, the calories go way up. And calories count. Alas.
Center for Science in the Public Interest has just done calorie counts on meals served at Olive Garden and Romano’s Macaroni Grill. Pretty impressive! I don’t think you need complicated arguments about fat vs. carbohydrates to explain why people gain weight when they routinely eat meals like these. While I thoroughly agree that 50 or 100 extra calories a day do not really add up to pounds a year (because metabolism compensates for small differences), we are talking here about thousands of extra calories a day. Italians in Italy don’t eat this much, or at least they didn’t used to.
