Let’s Abstain from Mandatory Calorie Counts

Ireland’s minister for health Simon Harris recently announced plans to mandate that restaurants display calorie counts next to all items on their menus. The idea has been floating around for some time, and similar initiatives have been proposed in the UK and elsewhere to combat obesity.

The reasoning is simple enough. Consumers currently don’t know what the calorific content of most restaurant meals are. Most people don’t have a particular desire to be overweight. Therefore, calorie counts on menus provide consumers with information they can use to make better decisions about their well-being, while tackling obesity. Most restaurants don’t provide this information voluntarily, so a mandate will ensure that consumers will have access to it wherever they dine. This, we assume, will lead to people selecting lower-calorie and healthier food choices, helping them lose weight..

Sounds reasonable, right? However, there’s problems with this idea. A lot of problems, in fact. Let’s consider them in turn.

The Evidence

First off, this approach has already seen disappointing results. A review of outcomes in 2013 found that “current evidence does not support a significant impact on calories ordered”. At best, the policy “may lead consumers to purchase slightly fewer calories”, with the reliable evidence being highly variable. The US Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, categorized the evidence as “limited and inconsistent”.

Going a step deeper, it’s also not at all clear that promoting a “calorie count” approach to dieting is even a worthwhile idea to begin with. This might seem odd – how else can you lose weight without running a calorie deficit? Supporting this idea are studies that, over periods of time typically under a year, find adopting a calorie-counting strategy associated with weight loss.

Great! But once we go to longer time periods, things get tricky. Calorie counting may help with short-term weight loss, but that’s true of many so-called “fad” diets too. A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association with over 600 participants even found that “there was no significant difference in weight change between a healthy low-fat diet vs a healthy low-carbohydrate diet”. The same study also asserted that “no one dietary strategy is consistently superior to others for the general population.”

Further to this, in a recent article for Tufts Nutrition Magazine, numerous quoted nutritional experts with various views on healthy eating could agree on one thing: calorie counting doesn’t work. The head of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory Susan Roberts described the approach as “tedious, inaccurate, and sets you up for failure”, even while pushing back against the idea of ignoring calories altogether.

Taking all of this together, it doesn’t seem reasonable for public health policy to prioritize a particular dietary approach that doesn’t work for everyone, lacks evidence of long-term efficacy, and has a history of failure where it’s been tried. At the very least, the jury’s still out on this one.

Well, so what?

To the above you might say: “Who cares? Maybe the heath evidence isn’t so good here, but it’s not like this is harming anyone. Providing more information to consumers is worthwhile anyway, and we shouldn’t care whether it tackles obesity”. This is an anti-paternalistic attitude that I confess, as a pretty libertarian-leaning guy, to be sympathetic to! Maybe we shouldn’t care about effects on health and weight; all that matters is helping consumers make choices that they feel are right for them. Give people the information; they can be as healthy or as unhealthy as they want with it.

My first response is that these policies tend to be explicitly implemented with public health goals in mind. If calorie counts don’t work on their own, then governments are likely to pursue additional, more paternalistic policies to get the outcomes they want. This kind of thinking is already going on in the UK, where new guidelines for calorie content were proposed. The hope would be changes would come voluntarily, but if this were not found to be the case, further actions such as additional taxes would be considered. 

But hey, that’s tomorrow’s problem! Let’s trick the bums into giving us our calories counts now. When the time comes to review the policy we’ll vote for someone else. We’ll distract the public health lobby with some other shiny issue. Or maybe we’ll engage in mass civil disobedience against the new Restaurant Calorie Tax by pouring massive amounts of delicious fatty oil over every meal we purchase. Take that Leviathan!

Were it so easy!

There are two assumptions with this line of thinking: First, that calorie counts are actually good information for consumers to have. Second, that such a mandate won’t lead to undesirable consequences. Let’s take each in turn.

The reality is the average consumer isn’t a nutritional scientist, and it’s unreasonable for us to expect them to have the knowledge of one. Putting calories on a menu suggests that this is important when making a decision. After all, when you see an “Allergen Advice: Contains Peanuts” label, you assume that some people must be allergic to peanuts. But going back to our experts, the Dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts Dariush Mozaffarian reckons that calories aren’t king here. What really matters for long-term weight management, he argues, is how food interacts with biological messaging pathways as information.

Food is more than just an energy source. It’s vitamins that bolster your immune system. It’s minerals that keep your blood healthy. As we’re increasingly coming to understand, it’s information that has a huge impact on your metabolic rate. This can all impact on how you process energy and lose weight. Reducing this to a calorie count may actively mislead consumers into selecting low-calorie but nutrient-poor food over meals that are healthier overall. If it’s quality rather than just calorific quantity of food that matters, then calorie counts might lead consumers to think they’re making informed, healthy choices when the opposite is actually true.

The hidden costs…

There’s also potential costs here. These policies are considered necessary because restaurants typically don’t provide this information off their own bat. But why is this? As any good Hayekian knows, markets and prices are more than just how much cash you have to fork over. They are mechanisms for distributing information and aggregating what customers value against what it costs businesses to provide. So if customers want this information, and it’s trivial for restaurants to provide, why isn’t it there? The lack of spontaneous emergence in the hyper-competitive restaurant sector suggests that there’s a cost involved. With razor-thin margins, this policy could be the final straw that sees your favourite little eatery close up shop.

Furthermore, mandating this information might change the way restaurants operate in other ways. Taking our argument about costs above, what happens to specials? If calorie counts are needed for every menu item, specials become more burdensome to have and rotate regularly. A lot of people (including myself) also like to see cooking as a more intuitive than exact medium. A lot of recipes I follow recommend ‘a pinch of x, a handful of y, add z to taste’. Calorie counts could well discourage such approaches. Instead, chefs may be encouraged to adopt more ‘standardization’ and use of pre-packaged rather than fresh ingredients, something Irish restaurateurs have raised concerns about.

…and hidden harms.

There may be more serious harms here too. Responding to proposals for mandatory calorie counts, Daniel Pryor of the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute points out that there’s reason to think that slapping calories on everything we eat is psychologically damaging to individuals with eating disorders, and that “those with eating disorders particularly benefit from having the choice to eat at restaurants that don’t provide a constant reminder of calorie consumption.” The preferences of these people matter too, and this concern is echoed by charities that represent them like Beat and SEED Eating Disorder Care.

It’s not clear that these negatives are balanced out by consumers who want calorific information universally available. Putting my libertarian hat on again, I would suggest that the best thing to mandate here is nothing. Instead, let these competing preferences have it out in the marketplace.

A note on culture

I’ve just one more remark to make. Between an obesity crisis, everything that gives you cancer, and all the ways your children are put in harms way if you’re not careful, I sometimes feel like we’re in a culture obsessed with death. Not a day goes by without reminders of the myriad different ways I might die, and what I should do to trim back the odds of making my exit in that particular manner.

I – perhaps ironically – don’t think this is healthy. Life is for living. We’re here for a short time, so make it a good time. In isolation, calorie counts are of limited relevance here. All of it together, though, amounts to a cultural milieu we shouldn’t encourage. Instead we ought to pare it back, even if just a little.

After reading this piece, I hope you think there’s merit to this outlook too. And maybe you can agree that opposing mandatory calorie counts isn’t a bad place to start.

Photo by {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}