And this, from Ezra Klein, doesn't make any sense:
Restaurants know that consumers have no effective way of comparing the caloric content of meals. Diners know, of course, that a burger is worse for you than a banana. But eggs cooked in a vat of butter look like eggs cooked in very little butter. A salad with a dressing that adds 600 calories looks like a salad with a dressing that adds 300 calories. People return to restaurants for taste and price and ambiance, because that's what they can measure. So restaurants jack up the caloric content pretty heedlessly.
If menu labeling is passed, however, and consumers exhibit any preference toward relatively less fattening items, that creates an incentive to reformulate those items to be less fattening. California, which recently passed a labeling law for restaurants with more than 20 locations, is seeing this happen. The Macaroni Grill, for instance, just cut its scallop and spinach salad from an astonishing 1,270 calories -- do they grow the spinach in butter? -- to 390 calories. Denny's has slimmed down its Grand Slam breakfast. And the law hasn't even gone into effect yet.
But this is exactly the response we'd expect. The Macaroni Grill's example is a good one. Ordering the spinach and scallop salad is the sort of thing that you'd do if you were watching your calories. But since you didn't actually know how many calories were in the dish, the Macaroni Grill could make it delicious and filling and fatty and you really weren't any the wiser. That made the Macaroni Grill more attractive to healthy eaters even as it was actually tricking them. Now customers will know the caloric content, and so the Macroni Grill reformulated the dish so it's more in line with diner preferences.
If people weren't going to act on the labelling, Macaroni Grill wouldn't be changing its menu. I doubt they'd be rejiggering their kitchen staff if California passed a law requiring restaurants to publish the name of the workers who made my salad, because that wouldn't change my behavior.
That said, I doubt this is going to have more than a very limited impact on either diner or restaurant behavior. Obsessing about the calories in your food is an activity largely limited to high SES people. That's especially true of men: constant worrying about weight has crept down the female half of the income distribution, but affects perhaps the top 10-20% of males.
Those are the people most likely to . . . order a scallop and spinach salad at Macaroni Grill. But they're also the most likely to check calories on the website. And they're the most likely to already be thin. The people ordering the four-cheese ravioli probably aren't under the misimpression that this is going to make them thin.
Moreover, I bet that after Macaroni Grill reformulates its scallop and spinach salad, more people start ordering heavier entrees, because they suddenly notice that they're still hungry after they eat the salad. As we've proven over and over and over again with every fake sweetener and imitation fat, you may fool the eyes . . . you may even fool the taste buds . . . but the body knows. And it almost always gets what it wants in the end.
Something is wrong with a dinner entree that is only 390 calories for, I'm guessing, $15 +- $2.
Furthermore, sometimes these dishes can be tremendously misleading due to the way they are presented. For instance, a dish that drips in butter may be 1200 calories while a dish that was lightly brushed in butter may be 600 calories....but maybe there's a side of butter to dip into?
Another example: Carabbas brings out a basket of bread. It's 500 calories for the entire basket (about 5-6 slices)....does that include olive oil to dip into, since that's seperate?
I bring this up because there is no way you can slash a spinach and scallops entree to almost 1/4th the original calories unless:
1. The original calculation included alot of pooled butter/olive oil which has been gotten rid of...
2. Something has been taken off the plate and is now presented as a no-charge side option
3. The entree itself (low calorie spinach and scallops) have been significantly reduced.
4. A combo of 1 and 3
As a 180 pound, 5'10" guy who consumes 3000 calories a day, I want my entrees to be around 600-900 calories. Oh, and when I pay $15 for them, i want them to be around 1200-1800 calories so I'll eat half, take the other half home, and feel like I got my money's worth a bit.
Mmmm... my problem is when I skip the donut for some carrots I end up eating an apple too because I want something sweet, but then that still doesn't satisfy my appetite and I eat the donut 20 minutes later too.
I would support the legislation under a right to know theory. Give the consumer the information and let him/her make the informed decision.
But I don't expect it to have any great effect. Restaurants generally serve large portions because the cost of the food is a relatively small part of the cost of the meal but it allows them to charge more, making it easier to pay the rent and make payroll each month.
People eat more for a variety of reasons. If you are hungry, you will crave heavier foods so, when dieting, it's important to not let yourself get too hungry. Research has also shown that we eat more when we eat with others and often fool ourselves about how much we're eating.
Labeling won't change any of that so I don't see it as doing much to address obesity.
Your right to know does not mean I have an obligation to expend resources to inform you (OTOH labeling for allergies probably does create an obligation).
There is also the issue that purely counting calories is not sufficient. Some calories are worse for you than others--some fats (for example transfats are worse that industrial vegetable oils (Wesson etc.) are worse than fats high in Omega Threes etc. Processed Sugar processed out of an apple is worse than that same sugar still in teh apple etc. The line between which health information restaurants "should" publish and which they shouldn't gets VERY difficult to nail down very fast.
Ultimately if you're not a moron it's pretty obvious if something is high calorie. If you really are interested in taking care of your body you know.
If you don't know your ignorance places no moral obligation on the restaurateur.
It really is a sad day when someone calling themselves a libertarian can get behind this kind of silliness with a straight face.
It does, actually. The government forces companies who want to sell you stock to provide accurate financial statements, companies who want to sell you bread to provide lists of ingredients, etc. It says that companies can't lie about the stuff they sell you. And I think that's just fine. Providing transparency--preventing people from buying things on false assumptions, like "this salad is good for me"--is the proper job of government.
i want them to be around 1200-1800 calories so I'll eat half, take the other half home, and feel like I got my money's worth a bit.
The problem is the more they put in front of you the more you eat. As the famous bottomless soup bowl experiment showed - people have a very hard time controlling portion size then the portion presented is overly large.
"people have a very hard time controlling portion size then the portion presented is overly large"
And that is a problem requiring government intervention?
And that is a problem requiring government intervention?
We're not telling the restaurant they can't serve soup in a large bowl or that meals can only be X size or X calories. Just that they have to tell you how many calories are there.
I'm really glad that I don't own a small restaurant. The cost of getting each meal tested has got to be insane.
Maybe instead of requiring menu labelling we should just have a disclaimer: "everything on this menu will make you fat, especially the good tasting stuff."
And lets be real, the 1300 calorie spinach and scallop was probably very tasty and the new 400 cal version not so much. And 1/3 as many scallops, but the same great price.
(and you'll eat a pint of Ben & Jerry's when you get home).
The California law, as I understand it, only requires chain restaurants (like Burger King or Macaroni Grill) to have their menus tested for calories. Small restaurants don't have to, since they generally change their menus a lot more often.
The NYC law, which has been in place for a couple of years or so, applies to any restaurants with at least 15 outlets nationwide. That seems to be a fair cutoff.
I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that anyone with any semblance of sense could look at a 1200 calorie salad and think it was somehow a healthy dish.
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that someone could order a salad containing scallops and think they were getting something healthy, but that's mostly b/c every scallop dish I particularly like is not particularly healthy, what with the copious butter used in preparation.
So perhaps some innocent naifs were unwittingly ordering the 1200 calorie scallop & spinach salad in earnest hope of sticking to their diet and were tricked by the evil, duplicitous plutocrats running the Macaroni Grill into gorging on butter-soaked scallops and spinach and never even noticed until their unfortunate weigh-in at the next Weight Watchers meeting but I kind of doubt it.
At the worst, a few idiots ordered the thing and when they got it must have been like "woah! guess this isn't on my diet after all..."
And, of course, folk who don't particularly care what they eat might have enjoyed it and ordered it repeatedly. And folk who do care but occassionally eat something 'sinful' might have indulged on occassion as well.
So fantastic. Let's celebrate the fact that our menus have taken a step towards forcing the lowest-common-denominator's diet ever-so slightly towards healthfulness. Maybe with enough time, rules, regulations and attention by well-meaning government bureaucrats we can completely eliminate every guilty pleasure from America's diet in the hopes of getting the least conscientious person's diet up to some minimally acceptable standard.
Sounds like a glorious place to live. Every man's body a temple zealously guarded by government diet police.
Which is, of course, not even to mention the utter futility of trying to organize society in such a way as to do a better job of running the personal, every-day life of someone who doesn't care enough to do a good job of it themselves.
As a general rule, if someone doesn't care enough to take care of himself, you are going to have an uphill battle caring about them enough to make up for their own lack. Particularly if it's not you and some close family member or friend but a government bureaucrat and some faceless citizen 'out there'.
Oh, come on. I'm overweight and trying to count calories, and I went out to eat with a friend who was in town a couple weeks ago. I didn't know where we were going beforehand so I didn't look at the menu online like I usually do. I got a salad, not the healthiest one but one I figured was in the medium range. Maybe 800-900. It was 1260. The other one I'd been looking at, that I probably would have enjoyed just as much, was 630. That's a decision I absolutely would have made with calories listed on the menu.
And even if I were healthy and didn't care how much I ate when I went out, I'd still care about the choices other people make. Having 30% of the country obese puts a massive strain on our health insurance premiums, because it's a shared risk pool. That's money coming out of my pocket to pay for other people's bad decisions. I don't think it's too much to ask for large chains to spend a trivial amount of money putting basic nutritional information on their menus so at least some percentage of people can make better choices for themselves. That's not a "government diet police".
Oh I agree with you & Megan that having the calorie information available is a no-brainer. When it comes to cheaply available information, I'm by-and-large a "more the merrier" type.
I was just saying that I find it hard to believe that anyone would mistake a 1200 calorie salad for a healthy option. But I guess you can confuse it with a 900 calorie salad, though that still doesn't seem all that healthy to me. Were the 630 calorie salad and the 1260 calorie salad really not differentiable? It seems difficult to believe, but maybe I just don't have enough experience with salads.
The diet-police thing will come about after the requirement to include calorie information everywhere has no negligible effect on our collective wastelines. So the folk who see the government as the solution to everything will come up with a 'better', 'more effective' set of regulations that are only marginally more intrusive. When those likewise fail, a still more intrusive set will be in the wings.
Ultimately, I believe trying to figure out a way for a group of well-meaning experts to craft a set of regulations to save us from ourselves will prove impossible and definitely counterproductive in that it will certainly have other, prob. detrimental effects on society.
But the thinking process of those who see government as the ultimate solution to all of life's problems can never identify any point at which government action will have proven ineffective. Any perceived shortcoming of government efforts just becomes itself an argument for further government effort.
At any rate. Good luck with the calorie counting, I hope you lose the weight you're trying for.
I bet most people wouldn't confuse a 1200 calorie salad for a 600 calorie salad by looking at them, but when you are ordering off the menu, a salad that has, say, "walnuts and chicken breast in raspberry vinaigrette" can be either one with plain ol' walnuts, plain ol' vinaigrette and grilled, skinned chicken, or one with candied walnuts, creamy vinaigrette with tons of sugar, and deep fried chicken.
The problem is eating restaurant or carryout meals for a significant percentage of one's total food consumption. Sometimes you have to, for example while traveling. And the occasional splurge for good (and caloric) restaurant food is a lot of fun. But no nutritional label can compare to the feedback you get when you pour the cooking oil out yourself.
The long-term social impact of labeling laws is basically impossible to predict, so speculating about it, while amusing, is almost pointless. The laws deserve support purely on a right-to-know basis. Even if only ten percent of customers want to know the dietary information, why not provide it, especially since the laws are tailored so that only large companies that are capable of absorbing the expense (and spreading it over the prices of millions of meals) will be affected?
I for one find it very difficult to guess how many calories there are in a dish. I was surprised on a recent visit to a ball park concession stand to discover that the French fries had way, way more calories than either a hot dog or a large pretzel. Since I like all three items about the same, I skipped the fries and got a pretzel instead. In this case, "will power" had nothing to do with it--just knowing the facts enabled me to save 400 calories or so.
Dude, French fries are basically the *calorie* part of the potato--almost pure carbohydrates soaked in FAT. (that's what cooking oil is).
It may not seem very productive, but every minute spent blogging about food labeling regulations is a minute not spent blogging about health care reform.
You are aware that food labels are a form of health care right?
Yeah, but it's so far down on everybody's usual list of priorities that it's just as good as not blogging about health care reform.
"So perhaps some innocent naifs were unwittingly ordering the 1200 calorie scallop & spinach salad in earnest hope of sticking to their diet and were tricked by the evil, duplicitous plutocrats running the Macaroni Grill into gorging on butter-soaked scallops and spinach and never even noticed until their unfortunate weigh-in at the next Weight Watchers meeting but I kind of doubt it.
At the worst, a few idiots ordered the thing and when they got it must have been like 'woah! guess this isn't on my diet after all...'"
People probably aren't oblivious to the fact that the scallop and spinach salad wasn't a perfectly healthy dish, but I bet a significant number of people ordering it still thought it was healthier than the non-salad entrees, which is hopefully not true for some entree items that seem much heartier (I don't eat at Macaroni Grill, is a 1200 calorie salad really one of the healthier entrees?)?
Still I agree with you in that I would expect the benefit of these labeling laws to be limited (although I will like comparing labels). A significant portion of the people that really care about this will be the type of people that have invested in some of the Eat This, Not That books.
My biggest problem is the arbitrariness - and the obvious anti-chain bias - of this regulation.
20 stores may allow you to spread the cost around, but if this is a major health concern (CRISIS!) then who cares. If I go into Bill's Jumbo Burger and order 1/2 lb of fries, they are probably worse for me then the McD's down the street's large order - but only the non-local store has to warn me.
I don't think this is even about health, I think this is just like the anti-capitalists using climate change to promote socialism, but here they are using health to harm larger restaurants because of some aesthetic they dislike. I think if you discuss any health implications of this you are playing the fool.
Give me a break. If the law were written to apply to every restaurant you'd complain it's using health to harm small businesses because of the comparatively larger costs they incur. Small businesses often don't already have this information calculated (chains usually do, since it's on their website already), and tend to use less formulaic meals and more daily specials and such. It would obviously be far more costly to apply it to them, for not a whole lot of benefit because the vast majority of meals in most areas (especially the obese ones) are eaten at chains.
As others have pointed out, assuming the calories in/calories out theory were true, humans typically consume ~500K to ~1M calories per year (let's say 700K for ease of calculations). At 3.5K calories per pound, an error of 20%--at 2000 cals/day, that's an extra 400 cals/day--would result in a gain of 20 lbs./year. The fact that without extensive labeling, very few of us are gigantic blobs, should tell you how good the human body is at calibrating its own dietary needs.
There are a lot of other factors that play into that. As Ms McArdle sort of indicated, your body has ways of "knowing" when you've had enough, if you don't confuse it with stuff like artifical fats and artificial sweeteners.
You've got coping mechanism.
This is another reason why labeling is a bad idea--it is disingenuous from the start. If I use a couple pieces of bread (carbohydrates) to sop up every last bit of juice and butter from a meal leaving my plate almost clean enough to put another meal on, I've eaten 10-20% more calories than the guy who left a bit of meat on the bone and didn't bother with the garnish.
The fact that you say that "very few of us are gigantic blobs" makes me think you must live in a city. Next time you are driving through a rural area, stop off at a wal-mart and count the blobs. I don't know what forces are at work behind it (people walk more in cities? more social pressure to be thin?), but the rates of obesity in the rural south where I live are staggering.
I'm in favor of calorie labeling on menus--unlike some of the more, er, committed libertarians, I don't believe in a very significant right not to know things that make you uncomfortable with your decisions.
Sorry Megan, you're quite confused as to what the issue is.
It's not that I, the consumer, have a right not to know. Listed calorie counts can easily be ignored. It's that I, the restauranteur, have the right not to be forced, at significant expense, to provide such information, particularly when my customers don't even want it.
For me, the argument ends there. We have no grounds, not moral, not ethical, and certainly not constitutional, to force eateries to provide this information. Full stop.
Three cheers Noah.
That's rather simplistic - just imagine all of the ways the costs of regulation can be passed on to consumers.
Though, as the epitome of the high SES male, the foods most affected by this are already verboten, regardless of the premium a healthy lunch commands... The obese are clearly unwilling to pay, in time, effort, or dollars for the costs of their decisions.
Oh, my aching eyes (wait, I'm in nyc, so nevermind)
I'm concerned about compliance costs. Its not just the cost of testing each and every item, its the added cost of making sure that every item in the same group are the same. Even if they are made by different cooks, in different restaurants, with ingredients sourced by different suppliers. Electronic and automotive manufacturers are used to that sort of process control, but cooks are not.
I lost 91 lbs over the course of about 12 months. I did this by obsessively counting calories and writing down how much I burned exercising.
A lot of my weight gain up to that point came from ignorance - I didn't know what a serving of meat looks like (3.5 oz, the size of a deck of playing cards) or that one Oreo Double Stuff cookie "costs" 70 calories, or about 6 minutes on the elliptical trainer for a 250-lb man.
I think losing weight is exactly like budgeting. No one would suggest that pricing information does not affect behavior. No one would be opposed to the "Truth in Lending" disclosures, even though anyone with half a brain and an HP-12C can work out cost of credit themselves.
I can tell you from personal experience that my ability to lose weight was helped by knowing I could lose half the calories in lunch by asking them to hold the cheese, mayo, pesto, and fries from my Chicken Rustica sandwich.
Congrats, dude- 91 lbs is incredible!
And it almost always gets what it wants in the end.
But you do have some control over what your body wants. Lots of exercise tells your body that you're in an environment where higher performance machine is important and your body will then 'want' to slim down and muscle up.
Mandatory labeling laws are:
1) An unnecessary expense,
2) An obstacle to creative cooking (how many restaurants are going to feature specials if they have to calculate the nutritional info)?
3) A boon to chain restaurants and big restaurant supply businesses who can afford to do the calculations (and also all the food-lab experiments needed to try to fool the palate into being satisfied--at least for a while--with 'lite' entrees).
The non-chain restaurants don't have to do the calculations. They're exempt from NYC's law, and from every proposed law I've seen for exactly that reason. And chain restaurants very rarely do specials that they haven't already calculated the exact recipe and information for as is.
The non-chain restaurants don't have to do the calculations. They're exempt...
For now perhaps -- but many regulations of this type have been hitting small producers and their customers. Examples would include 'raw milk' and the recent lead testing standards that nailed craft toy producers.
And if you believe the public health logic behind the labeling regulations, it makes no sense to exempt non-chain restaurants -- who will protect people from fat and calorie-laden dishes served by family run restaurants?
Lots of exercise primarily seems to tell your body that you're using an awful lot of energy and you'd better give it some fuel. Exercise alone, without dietary modifications, has been repeatedly proven to be less effective at producing weight loss than dieting. The body's compensatory mechanisms are pretty powerful,
Nor does adding extra muscle mass burn nearly as many calories as suggested. It's more like 5 extra calories, rather than the 50-calorie figure that often gets repeated, and it takes a LOT of effort to add even a single pound of muscle. It's also nearly impossible to add muscle and lose fat at the same time, unless you are an exercise novice or using hormone/drug supplementation, because you need a caloric surplus to generate muscle tissue. That's why bodybuilders go through cycles of bulking to add mass and cutting to strip off the fat portion of that mass. That's also why elite strength athletes are often fat, despite intensive workouts designed exclusively to build muscle.
You need to take an evolutionary perspective. If you were re-designing the human body, how big would you make it? And how much muscle mass would you give it and how much body fat? More size and muscle helps you do all kinds of useful things (forage, catch prey, compete with rivals), and body fat hurts (the dead weight slows you down and requires extra energy to haul around). BUT...larger size and lots of muscle raises the overhead of staying alive--your baseline metabolism and calorie requirements are higher. If you knew your re-designed humans were going to live where food was abundant and famines would never happen, you'd design people who all looked like Olympic athletes, but what if you didn't know ahead of time, what would you do?
Here are some things that would make sense:
1. If food is plentiful during maturation, grow bigger and taller. If it's scarce, grow slower and stay smaller.
2. If you experience no famines and lots of physical activity, reduce fat reserves and build more muscle.
3. If do you experience famines, take the opportunity to build fat reserves when the famine is over and food is available. Also, go easy on the muscle.
This is approximately what bodies actually do. Restricted calorie diets act like famines -- in the short term, you lose weight. But in the process you convince your body and its appetite mechanism that it had better bump up the fat reserves when it has the chance. Your body doesn't know the difference between diets and famines (it wasn't built to take into account the far-fetched possibility that you're starving yourself on purpose).
Eggs cooked in a "vat" of butter are poached eggs, which look very different than eggs cooked in a little butter. (sauteed, but usually called "fried eggs")
From economics, to health care, to breakfast, is there anything Ezra Klein doesn't not know?
Actually, poached eggs are cooked in water, often with a little vinegar splashed in; the whole point of poaching as a cooking process is that no fat or oil is used in the preparation.
Fried eggs, on the other hand, can be either sauteed (little butter) or actually fried (lots of butter), but will look similar either way. I don't always agree with Klein, but he did get the eggs right.
Ah. Good point. Immersion in a liquid other than water would be braising, and there's really no such method of cooking eggs in melted butter, as the butter would burn before it reached the time + temperature needed to cook eggs. Which is why the reference to a "vat" of butter is silly.
But I disagree with your characterization of sauteed v. fried. I've never heard of the term "sauteed eggs" and "fried" anything is usually a misnomer unless it refers to immersion in hot oil.
Pardon my ignorance, but can someone tell me what "high SES people" means?
I'm assuming socioeconomic status from the context. IE, only rich males count calories (which I'm pretty sure is true).
I think Megan left out of her post the part of Ezra Klein's post that would support the "this doesn't make sense" thesis, which is the part where he says that consumers probably won't change their behavior that much due to calorie labeling. But I still don't think it's right to say that Klein's post doesn't make sense. He may be saying that a small difference in consumer preference can lead to dramatic actions by vendors. Or he may be saying that while labeling calories based on what's on the menu right now may not make much difference, having the labels affords restaurants an opportunity to create new low-cal dishes that will make a dramatic difference.
Spot on Matt. I do not see the lack of sense in Ezra Klein's observation. Disclosure requirements may provoke small changes in behaviour but the possibility of small changes may have big effects in competitive markets. KFC didn't stop using "fried" for no reason. People to Ezra's right may disagree with his politics but he is reliably thorough in his research and rarely incoherent in his expression.
Megan's position appears to be that she supports something that she thinks will do negligible good, with no reference to the costs it will impose. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is nonsensical.
I would prefer having calories on the menu.
But I am against using the government to require it.
It's micromanaging and totalitarian. It is totally incompatible with freedom and totally unacceptable in a free country.
I don't know.. admittedly, I suppose I'm a high SES male. But I was clinically obese for awhile, and grew up in the midwest, so I figure I probably don't count as a weight-obsessive east-coast-metrosexual-sissy, which seems to be what high-SES is implying here. In any case, I would never, though, count calories online, or look up meals at a restaurant in a guidebook.
But as a resident of New York (where only the chains need to count), I do find myself drastically changing my choices when they're presented to me, and I think it's great. The first week of the law I was in Houlihan's, about to order the caesar salad, to try to be healthy for once. It was 1,200 calories-- I'd had no idea! Conversely I would definitely have avoided the fried calamari-- what I really wanted-- that was only 400 calories for a whole boxfull.
So basically, I just flat-out disagree that this won't change behavior. I know it's affected my decision just about every time I go into a chain. Moreover, it changed my lunching habits, after I saw the different chains, and I've now lost 20 lbs.
I'm with Liam on this one. People seem to think this is only useful if it gets folks to eat organic low-fat salads, but that's not the point. For me, it was when I went to Houlihan's and had a burger, with no desire to be healthy at all. Went online and thanks to places with laws, was able to find a PDF on an unofficial website (Houlihan's does not share it, even though its calculated). I was shocked that my meal was 2000 calories and had something like 100g of fat. I expected it to be bad for me, but not that bad.
I've since dropped a few restaurants and menu items from my rotation, and am more aware of what I'm doing to myself when I get take-out. I'm never going to have the willpower to actually eat healthily, but I'm just fine with better versions of "bad" food.
Given the public health issues associated with obesity, it is ridiculous to claim this is somehow too great a burden on chain stores. And the fact that restaurants fight disclosure in new locations when they've undergone the sunk costs is telling.
I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that anyone with any semblance of sense could look at a 1200 calorie salad and think it was somehow a healthy dish.
Salads and salad dressings are a major source of "stealth" calories. People think they're low calorie ("It's just a salad!") without realizing that the calorie counts can be sky-high.
This drives me nuts.
Health and obesity are NOT about calories out, calories in! The human body is so much more complicated, and way beyond being distilled into a simplistic (and wrongheaded) application of the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Please, I beg of all of you to read Gary Taubes book, Good Calories Bad Calories, or Loren Chordain's books/research on paleolithic diets, or go to Art DeVaney's web site or Mark Sisson's site (Mark's Daily Apple) or rent the movie Fathead.
I have no financial stake in any of the above, but this is (IMHO) the most important issue in health care today: the fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises a healthy diet. A calorie of fat is different from a calorie of protein is different from a calorie of carbohydrate because how your body processes and responds to these different macronutrients is NOT the same.
2 pounds of grass-fed, grass-finished, free-range, lean burger meat IS better for you than a single (modern) banana and certainly better than a bunch of bananas. But the burger bun is much worse than the meat or the banana.
And while I'm at it, forget going for a 20 to 60 min jog at 85% max heart rate. Spend that time running 6 to 10 hard sprints and lifting some really things (barbells, children, your dog). It is what your body is evolved to do (over the course of a lifetime...humans are remarkably adaptive in the short-run).
Not only are fats, carbs, and protein different, but there are differences within each category. There are "resistant" carbs that reduce your body's absorption of carbs, for example. Also, the actual formula would be "Calories in - calories burned - calories excreted = weight gain/loss." How many calories you excrete can vary, too.
Having said all that, I would love to see nutritional information on menus just like on food items at stores. Even an ingredient list with approximate amounts would be helpful. I'm torn on the idea of government mandates, though without a government mandate it will never happen at most restaurants.
I work as a cook in a restaurant in a small place that wouldn't be covered by this. But really I could probably do a average calorie count for most of the stuff that we cook pretty easily. Would it change things at the margins for customer choice, absolutely. For brunch I made a shrimp, beef tip, and scallop saute with a mustard vinaigrette glaze over grits that probably was way up there in the calories.
It may actually have been more than the Reuben Strata covered in gravy. But I am absolutely sure that a couple of the orders for the saute would have turned to other options on the menu if people knew how it was made and how many calories it had in it. That would change my menu construction in order to have more healthy options. Ezra's argument is exactly correct in reference to issues of availability. When you are selling something that is ostensibly healthy and it is shown not to be then one part of the selling point for the dish is gone and it makes more sense to try and construct something actually healthy rather than just let peoples misconceptions about health effect their buying.
The issue is less people confusing high calorie food for low calorie or "healthy" food than that people drastically underestimate the number of calories/fat grams in the (many) unhealthy options. I've seen various studies showing people to be off by about a half when estimating menu options in the range of 1000-1300 calories. Apparently even registered dieticians have difficulty estimating just how incredibly high in calories and fat restaurant items are. I don't think people are "morons" for being wrong about this. In my experience, a restaurant version of a dish uses a lot more oil, etc., than any recipe I would be using to make the same sort of thing at home, so I would guess part of the problem is that people are not accounting enough for the differences in home cooking preparation and restaurant methods.
Also, of course, the existence of health halos, in which foods are judged based on category (e.g. salad) or source (e.g. Subway), has a pernicious effect.
The academic literature on the effect of nutrition information is mixed, and the results may be sensitive to experimental design differences. One thing that comes immediately to mind, however, is: who has a better idea how supplying this information will affect consumer behavior - people reading this blog or the people who run these restaurants? Since the nutrition information has already been calculated and is available on the web sites of a lot of restaurant chains that continue to resist putting the information at the consumer point of purchase, it makes me suspect that proprietary marketing research shows it may have an effect restaurant owners won't like.