Adding nutrition information to menu labeling has been, and will continue to be, a hot button topic among the retail food industry. Efforts to curtail the obesity epidemic and the co-morbities that come with it can often seem at odds with the goals of restaurants or convenience food businesses. In March of 2010 Congress passed a national law requiring chain restaurants or dining establishments with 20 or more locations to post nutrition information on menus or menu boards. The details of this ruling are still being sorted out. For more information about the menu labeling debate visit the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Proponents of the change state that it will give Americans the tools they need to make better choices while dining out; opponents state there is not enough room on menus to list nutrition information and that it is not clear what needs to be included or what doesn’t.
Nutrition information is currently available for many of the restaurants most American’s frequent. Fast Food establishments usually have nutrition information for their menu items online or posted in the restaurant. Sites like Healthy Dining Finder collect nutrition information for many different restaurants and publish that information on their site, along with suggestions for healthy meals at the various locations. However, this article in the Washington Post points out a very obvious problem with posting nutrition information; will people make better choices when the information is right in front of them? Several restaurants are finding no difference in how their customers eat when ordering at the establishment even when nutrition information is listed clearly in the menu.
How do you feel about including nutrition information on menus? Do you think it will be effective in making better selections while dining out, which Americans are doing more than ever? Do you have any solutions that would be more effective for the retail dining environment? Do you think that adding nutrition information to menus will have an impact on the meal choices individuals make?
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Posted in:Culture Change, Nutrient Analysis-Menu Label Rules, Nutritional Analysis, OnDemand, Recipe, Technology
I have several thoughts on the subject but they may not fit neatly into the article.
1. When you buys something (really anything) as a consumer you should have the information about what you are purchasing made available to you. This should apply to food or anything else. I mean really, what are you buying, what’s in it? Don’t you want to at least have the option to know what’s in the food you are buying?
2. For many people and families who live with a diabetic (type 1 or type 2) you can’t even eat the food unless you can determine the number of carbs in it. There’s not even a good way to guess at many restaurants and if you can’t guess it, you really can’t eat it. So in my mind these restaurants just lose a ton of potential customers. Now these may not be the big chain restaurants (because they have nutrition counts) but that’s only really a fraction of the restaurants out there.
3. What’s the harm in requiring an establishment selling food to let their customers know what’s in it? The mindset on buying food is the thing that’s out of whack.
Over your lifetime you will likely spend more on food than anything else and you don’t even know what you’re buying and putting into your body. If you were buying a house you would have it inspected and know what you are getting. If you bought a car, you would want to know all the specs and details. So why then with food would you not want to at least have the information available… ??
I agree with you on your points and definitely see your side of the argument. Just to play with fire a little bit, I’ll tell you about some of the opposition I’ve been finding in regards to this issue.
One of the major downsides that I’ve seen from my research is the cost of reprinting menus and menu information to include nutrition information. There is also some general disagreement about what needs to be included. Diabetics need the carbohydrate counts. Almost everyone needs to be monitoring their sodium intake. Should we or shouldn’t we include saturated and unsaturated fats, or just total fat content? How many vitamins and minerals should we include? Some argue about why waste the money and time when most restaurants make food to order, which will almost always throw off the nutrition content of that item, making the label invalid. Another argument is that most people don’t read the nutrition labels on the food items they buy at stores, why would we expect them to read it at the restaurant? Also, there’s the major issue that a lot of people just don’t want to know. There was a survey done in New York after they began to make nutrition information in restaurants mandatory where several of the people interviewed were upset about being made to feel guilty about the food they ordered. The ironic part was that they took the time to read the label, but it didn’t encourage them to order something different than they normally do, just make them feel bad about it.
Before something like nutrition labeling on menus is an effective intervention individuals need to be educated on how to read a label and what constitutes a healthy choice.