Continued from home page... The law, which applies to all restaurant chains with more than 20 outlets, will take the US Food and Drink Administration a year to draft and enforce (3). Will it work? Or, to be more precise, will customers tend to choose lower-calorie products, and will manufacturers, retailers and caterers reduce the calorie count of their products?

In a commentary published by the New England Journal of Medicine (4), Marion says that it’s too soon to be sure. Studies carried out in New York and other US states and cities where local calorie labelling laws are already in force, do seem to show some tendency to make lower (or less high) calorie choices. ‘Two factors are crucial here’ Marion says. ‘One is that the disclosure is prominent and easy to understand. Two is that the disclosures also state the recommended total daily consumption of calories, which is usually given as 2,000’.

And what about product formulation? ‘I think it stands to reason that some companies will ease off some monster products, and think twice about other products such as very sugary or fatty drinks’, she says, ‘including coffee-based drinks and baked goods whose calorie content is beyond belief’. But this is only a beginning of a long story. In her book (2) she points out: ‘A bag of my favorite barbecued potato chips lists 150 calories for a 1-ounce serving. This opaque bag contains 8.5 servings, however, and 1,275 calories. If you blindly reach into that bag, you can easily eat more than 150 calories’. Together with former Cornell Provost Malden Nesheim, she is just beginning to write a book about calories for University of California Press.

Marion’s concerns are not only for people. This month she publishes Feed Your Pet Right, also co-authored with Malden Nesheim (5). What’s the secret? ‘Well’, she says, ‘A good start for humans is, don’t eat anything you would not feed to your dog. And, as with humans, there are many healthful ways to feed dogs and cats, so your own value systems can apply to pets as well. The biggest problem in pet feeding is giving them too many calories along with not enough activity, which ought to sound quite familiar’.

Reference

1. Pollan M. In Defense of Food. An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008.
2. Nestle M. What to Eat. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006.
3. Associated Press. Will US calorie labeling cause menu change? 31 March 2010.
4. Nestle M. Health care reform in action: calorie labeling goes national. New England Journal of Medicine, Online First, 7 April 2010 (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1003814).
5. Nestle M, Nesheim M. Feed Your Pet Right. New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010