One of the many pieces of legislation buried deep in the 2,400 pages of the US new health care bill H.R. 3590: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed by President Barack Obama into law on Tuesday, is that restaurant chains with 20 or more outlets will be required to show calorie counts next to food items on menus and menu boards: even drive-throughs will have to follow the new rule. They will also have to show how many calories a healthy person should eat in a day.
By this time next year, it could be in force across the nation, making it virtually impossible to go into a McDonald’s restaurant and eat a Big Mac without knowing that you are consuming about a quarter of an average person’s calorie requirement as you do so (according to McDonald’s, a Big Mac packs around 490 calories).
The new law mandates the US Food and Drug Administration to draft a new national standard for menu labelling that will supersede legislation already in place or planned in many US states and cities, and according to an Associated Press (AP) report, will affect some 200,000 fast food and other chain restaurants.
The FDA will enforce the new law, and will have powers to initiate criminal prosecution if operators don’t follow it, said the AP report.
Senator Tom Harkin, who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, wrote the provision. He told the press that the reason behind this move was so that consumers can see the calorie information at the time they make their choice.
The information will be “… right on the menu or menu board next to the name of the menu item, rather than in a pamphlet or in tiny print on a poster,” said Harkin.
Some food companies and restaurant chains provide calorie information on the wrapper, a leaflet or on their website, so consumers can decide not to look at it, but the legislation will make it nearly impossible to ignore the information.
Vending machines, especially those selling foods where the calorie information is not clearly displayed on the front of the package as you make your selection, will also be required to show calorie information.
The restaurant industry helped draft the bill because many chains are facing a bureaucratic nightmare as individual states and cities bring in their own particular legislation.
Sue Hensley, a spokeswoman for the National Restaurant Association said on Tuesday that the industry was “extremely pleased” that the bill was signed into law.
“The association and the industry were supportive because consumers will see the same types of information in more than 200,000 restaurant locations across the country,” she added, according to a New York Times (NYT) report.
Kelly D Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, described the new law as “an historic development”, reported the NYT. He said Americans spend more than half their food dollars on eating out, and when they eat out they tend to eat more and worse.
“And part of the reason may be because they don’t know what’s in fast foods, and they’re often shocked to find out,” said Brownell, who conceded that some people will ignore the information, but he believes enough will take notice for it to translate to a public health benefit.
The non-profit watchdog and consumer advocacy group, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), is also celebrating the new law. They have been campaigning for nutrition labelling at chain restaurants since 2003.
Their nutrition policy director Margo G Wootan said in a statement on Sunday, the day the bill was passed through Congress, that:
“Coffee drinks can range from 20 calories to 800 calories, and burgers can range from 250 calories to well over 1,000 calories.”
“With the health reform legislation passed today, Congress is giving Americans easy access to the most critical piece of nutrition information they need when eating out,” said Wootan.
“While it’s a huge victory for consumers, it’s just one of dozens of things we will need to do to reduce rates of obesity and diet-related disease in this country,” she added.
However, passage of the new law is not welcome in some quarters, where the view is that the government is interfering too much in people’s private decisions, and there is insufficient evidence that menu labelling results in healthier eating.
But Brownell said it was not a case of needing to prove whether informing people about what they were eating led them to eat more healthily or not: they just have a right to know.
Sam Kazman, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, does not agree: if people want to know the information they can look it up on the Internet, he told the NYT, and if a restaurant wants to sell him food without any calorie information, he has a perfect right to buy it.
“This simply is not a federal issue,” said Kazman, adding that he feared if Americans don’t slim down as a result of this move the goverment will interfere even further, perhaps decide the words “aren’t scary enough” and make restaurants take even further action.
Sources: New York Times, Associated Press, Center for Science in the Public Interest, McDonald’s, OpenCongress.org.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD