Why do you see calorie-counts on menus as an absurd proposition? I understand soda taxes as being ridiculous, but showing calories is just presenting information. Maybe the followed separation of "healthy" options, thus creating an image of "unhealthy" images, could be an argument, but the sole presentation of information? I don't know how that's absurd. Couldn't it be appropriately paralleled that ingredient lists (raw information) are absurd, with that logic?

Asked by

davidrex-blog

(this ask refers to this post about ‘fat taxes’)

The reason calorie counts were made mandatory for certain chain restaurants by the recent US federal healthcare act (known colloquially as Obamacare) wasn’t because they’re 'information’ without any qualification. The reason is the belief that if people see the calories in the food, they would choose less caloric over more caloric options and, it was argued, get thinner.

From a Huffpost article:

The logic behind the idea of calorie posting is that it will educate consumers about how many calories they are about to eat, in the hopes that this will, in turn, curb problems related to overeating, like obesity and diabetes. Margo Wootan, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest told the AP that she also believed the calorie lists would provide some industry regulation, as corporations would be embarrassed to list sky-high calorie counts for their diet-busting sandwiches and other items.

Mandatory calorie counts have only been ever about 'combating obesity.’ Which is absurd because it doesn’t, and won’t. It’s also immoral, because fat people don’t deserve to be combated against.

In short, check your premises before you build a faulty chain of logic.

-ArteToLife

And, by the way, calorie counts on menus are massively inaccurate. First of all, the way we measure kilocalories in food is by burning it and seeing how much heat it gives off, something that bears no resemblance to the way the body processes food. Second, most restaurants, while they try to portion accurately, have variation, which changes even that inaccurate calorie count. And third, very few places are actually going to bother to send away samples of their food every single time they have a new item on the menu, so they assemble those numbers by guess and by gosh. The numbers on most menus have little to nothing to do with the number of calories that your body actually gets out of it.



And, again, this is all about “battling obesity,” which is shaming, eliminationist bullshit that further encourages eating disorders.

-MadGastronomer