"Restaurant menus that include calorie information do seem to encourage diners to exercise some restraint, a new study suggests.Yale is home to uber-fatty Kelly Brownell and one of Oprah's IMHO uber-whores, David Katz.
What's more, researchers found, menus that give added information -- namely, the number of calories the average adult should get in a day -- could prove even more effective at curbing appetites.
The findings, reported in the American Journal of Public Health, give some weight to the growing movement to require restaurant chains to place calorie information on their menus and menu boards.
In 2008, New York City became the first U.S. city to mandate such changes at fast-food and coffee chains. That law became a model for California and other U.S. states and cities that have since implemented or are considering similar measures.
And soon the federal government may be stepping in; provisions for menu labeling are part of the healthcare reform legislation currently before Congress.
The intention is to help combat the nation's obesity problem by raising consumer awareness of just how many calories lurk in their burgers, sandwiches, fries and desserts.
But questions have been raised about the effectiveness of menu labeling.
In October, an independent study of New York's law concluded that menu labeling had done nothing to change consumer habits in the city's low-income neighborhoods. Shortly thereafter, the city's health department released preliminary data from a larger study suggesting that New Yorkers had, in fact, started buying fewer calories at 9 of 13 fast- food and coffee chains included in the research...
The setting was experimental, and not "real world," but that allowed the researchers to show cause-and-effect, noted Christina Roberto, a doctoral candidate at Yale who led the study."
Here is a picture of Kelly:
You decide on the value of what comes out of Yale.
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