peck420 peck420:
If they can't be bothered to do the absolute minimum amount of research, for their own health, will seeing the caloric content actually change anything?
Of course it does! The entire advertising and marketing industry is based on the fact that you have to constantly push information to customers because they won't go out and fetch it on their own, and they often don't even know what information they should be looking for in the first place.
Do you really think that people do any kind of research on the products in their shopping carts? Their decisions are mostly based on the product labels and advertising, not because they went online to research what is the best brand of dish soap or jarred olive. Just because someone doesn't care to spend time researching every product they purchase doesn't mean they don't care to know any basic facts about the product and its quality. That's what product labels are for. A menu is like a product label. No customer has ever complained that the label provides too much info and they wish it told them less about the product.
It's neither practical or reasonable to expect that people would research and commit to memory the nutritional facts of every menu item of every restaurant where they might someday eat.
$1:
And here in lies the problem. People will make bad decisions because the only 'easy number' presented is one that has very little to do with the actual 'health' of your food.
This is why there are morbidly obese people that are starving.
Reminds me of Idiocracy...it has electrolytes!
Calories aren't the only thing that matters for proper nutrition but that's a false assumption and a false argument on your part. The false assumption is that the menu rule is meant to encourage people to eat a nutritionally balanced diet with all their vitamins and minerals. It's not. It's meant to HELP address one specific problem, which is obesity, whose main cause is excessive calorie consumption. It's not meant to cure people who are already morbidly obese, just put more information front and centre so people have a better idea of what they're taking in. People have fitbits that track how many calories they're burning, based on their popularity I think it's safe to assume there's general interest among those who also eat at restaurants to know how many calories they're putting back in.
It's not about making sure people get their minimum daily intake of riboflavin or getting enough vitamin C to stave off scurvy. It's not even about making sure kids get enough calcium for growing bones and teeth. This is just about the problem of excessive calorie consumption, which is a problem in and of itself.
This probably will prompt you to say that this one initiative alone won't solve obesity and won't suddenly transform people's lives. This is a false argument because very rarely in life is there one magical solution that solves a problem completely and nobody is pretending that is the case here. Most situations have many contributing factors and require many solutions, big and small
I have seen with my own eyes that the calorie count influences what people order (it is not the only factor of course) and I know that when people are aware that they've had a 1300 calorie lunch they don't go have a 1500 calorie dinner. I also expect that over time peoples nutritional literacy will improve and restaurants will respond by offering more low calorie options.
CKA Moderator 
CKA Moderator 
There are probably too many syllables involved.
Could be packaged in nitrogen, like most vegetables are. That will delay oxidation too.
