The title of this diary refers to this article published in TIME. Following this, I read an article in Business Week about legislation under consideration that would require fast food places to post a calorie count on the menu next to each item. Upon further research, I found out that it is HR 2426, The MEAL Act and has unfortunately become stalled in both the Senate and the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Current research all suggests that obesity/waist size is about 20X better correlated to the risk of developing diabetes and htn than every other factor studied, including how active a person is. And a report released this week suggests that if just obesity and smoking can be drastically reduced, we could save close to a trillion dollars, every single year, on our healthcare costs. All this serves to emphasize how important making this information readily available to consumers really is.
I can't emphasize how strongly I SUPPORT this legislation and want you to write your senator or representative to support it as well. People don't realize that a grilled chicken breast only has 180 calories while the same sized crispy chicken breast has 500 calories! They don't realize that a choc milkshake has over 600 calories, the same as eating 6 cups of frozen yogurt.
If people were confronted with just how big the discrepency in the calorie content of certain items on the drivethru menu itself, they would pick the healthier alternatives far more often, opting for grilled over crispy and for frozen yogurt over milkshakes more frequently. The market pressures from this would force fast food places to offer more and more healthier alternatives overtime. Please support the calorie labeling bill.
The article in TIME outlines all the research over the past two decades showing that calorie restriction is the ONLY effective way to lose weight. While exercise is very important, exercise by itself simply doesn't lead to weightloss, the article concludes. Study after study came to this same conclusion. The process of exercise often releases hormones that make a person overeat after the workout. There were several other factors in recent research pointed out that made exercise by itself ineffective in weightloss.
Don't get me wrong. My point is not that exercise isn't important. Exercise helps to raise your HDL cholesterol, lower your lipids, improve your heart, treat depression and serves many other functions. But if you're concerned with losing body fat, caloric control is absolutely essential. The article from TIME above does a good job of explaining physiologically why even additional muscle built up from exercise doesn't even make a dent in reducing the body's fat content. Multiple studies over the past two decades suggest that without caloric control, weightloss is very unlikely to happen. And further, without weightloss, exercise won't prevent diabetes. Even well educated and informed consumers often misguage how many calories are in certain foods, or which one of two alternatives is actually better for you. So giving people the information they need to make smarter decisions is critically important.
Companies are already required to provide information on the fuel-efficiency of cars, care instructions for clothing, and energy and water consumption of certain home appliances. It's more important that people be able to watch their calorie intake and reduce their risk of getting diabetes or heart disease than to know how to wash a blouse.
Companies already post nutrition information on the back of cereal boxes and other items in the grocery stores as well. Now thanks to those same labels, millions of people are using them to make smarter healthier choices. American adults and children consume, on average, one third of their calories from eating out. So why not have this information displayed on the menu in fast food restaurant drive thrus as well.
Estimates suggest that one third of the calories consumed by the average child come from eating out at restaurants and fast food places. Making this information transparently available to parents is just as important as it was to mandate the posting of nutrional information on the backs of cereal boxes.
Please use this link to contact your representative and ask them to support HR 2426 and S. 1048...
http://www.usa.gov/...
Please rec this diary up if you agree with it. It is my hope that some representative reading DKOs reads this and gets this legislation un-Tabled and out of commitee so that it has a shot at passing.