By J. Dabbraccio RN, MSN

Have you recently gone to a chain restaurant such as McDonald’s or Starbucks and noticed calories posted on the menu board? Were you delighted or upset to see this? Did you know New York City was the first place in the country to require calorie posting on chain restaurants and our government now wants to mandate it to be adopted nationwide? What did we all learn from this experiment? Did people choose healthier foods after knowing how many calories they were about to consume? Did people even notice that the calories were posted?

A recent New York Times article talks about a study performed by several professors at New York University which tracked 1,156 customers at four fast-food chains (McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken). The study “found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result. But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect in July 2008. Orders had a mean of 846 calories after the labeling law took effect. Before the law took effect, it was 825 calories.”

Flickr: heidihvt

I believe posting calories on menus is a good health initiative and will have a greater effect long term on people who were already monitoring their own health and diet intake prior to this initiative. The truth is that the majority of people who do eat out usually pay more attention to price of meal instead of the calories. Unfortunately, healthy meals are not cheap. Most people want to get the most out of their dollar when ordering out. If you do not have money to make the right healthier choice, then caloric information is irrelevant.

Also, do people really understand the meaning of calories? Do you know how many calories to consume per day for your needs? Most people do not.

A calorie is defined as a unit of measurement which represents the energy in food. When you read something on a label that says 200 calories, it’s a method of describing how much energy your body could get from eating or drinking it. In simple terms, when your body requires fuel it burns the calories in food for energy. If you eat more calories than your body needs at any given moment, it doesn’t burn those calories but instead stores them as body fat which eventually can lead to weight gain. If your body burns more calories than you eat, then you may possibly loose weight over an extended period of time.

As a quick guide, your body requires about fifteen times your body weight in calories in order to fuel your basal metabolism. Below is a chart showing the recommended average daily calorie intake for each gender and age group:

Recently, calorie posting has entered the national health care reform debate. Do you think we need calorie counts on menus in chain restaurants across America? Do you it will impact the way we order and consume foods? Please post your response on HealthGavel and let our debate begin!