27 Comments

Ordinarily I love finding delicious food around,and always can't help wanting to have some food.It becomes my hobby gradually.How many gourmet food can we taste during all the lifetime?Look forward.

Expand full comment

Just a note: the federal law going into effect applies only to chain restaurants with 20 or more outlets, precisely for the reasons you outline above. Every local calorie-labeling law I know about has a similar threshold. None of them apply to your favorite small ethnic restaurants, unless your favorite small ethnic restaurants are Chipotle and P.F.Chang's.

Expand full comment

What's suggested is that there's a lot that goes on inside the body that determines how much goes in and out. So some attempts at reducing calorie intake can result in the body trying to save more fat or causing much stronger feelings of hunger. Dr. Lustig thinks that insulin regulates this process.

Expand full comment

Your position might make sense if calories were magical little men who flew to your cells to make you feel like doing things. But they aren't. They're a measure of energy. And if you take in more energy than you expend, your body will store the excess, pro-rated for the additional energy cost of moving additional weight, as fat.

Expand full comment

If he isn't in the water he is eating.

They did a special on his diet during the Bejing Olympics...I can't remember exactly what it all was...but lots of bacon, eggs, ham, milk...all that stuff that is "supposed" to kill you.

Expand full comment

"If our food was just all organic," billions of people would die of starvation. Organic growing is more labour intensive and produces less food per acre than regular growing.

"World hunger is projected to reach a historic high in 2009 with 1 020 million people going hungry every day, according to new estimates published by FAO today."http://www.fao.org/news/sto...

And wouldn't you know it....most of those countries grow their food organically.

Expand full comment

I'm sure there is also physicists that thinks conservation of momentum/energy etc. is a "poor way of analyzing" things...Let me guess fat is epiphenomenal?

Expand full comment

Look at Micheal Phelp's diet. He is very lean but puts away a lot of all kinds of food including carbs.

Expand full comment

Kevin,Sounds like a stretch to me and a stark example of epistemology warping lawyerly argumentation.

Expand full comment

The costs fall disproportionately on small operations, especially those that don't serve a standardized menu. The cost for McDonald's would be small, since they serve highly homogenized, standardized food, and the menu costs could be distributed across thousands of restaurants.

Smaller restaurants often don't have a formal recipe for each dish, so the calorie amounts would have to be estimated for each cook. If calories listings are not enforced they could just make up a guess, but this would be close to worthless. If calorie amounts are enforced, then small operations would have to homogenize their food.

Tl;DR: Your rent seeking is going to bankrupt my favorite small ethnic restaurants.

Expand full comment

Why aren't more people concerned that this would adversely affect all non chain, If you are a small restaurant, and even worse with a daily menu, how can you count your calories.

Also this makes complete sense. If you only had 30 dollars a week to eat, would you go to a fast food restaurant. Absolutely not, you would eat large amount of rice and beans, and some other cheap veggies, because they are cheap and nutritional. If you were given 3000 dollars you would eat kobe beef and crazy deserts, so it's quite reasonable to assume that food subsidies can make people less nutritious.

Expand full comment

In other words, you want everybody to pay for information they don't care about, because you want it and are lazy.

Expand full comment

It's because they are physically active. I have worked very physical jobs, less physical, and physically passive jobs; and without much change in diet over the decades, my weight closely tracks my activity level. I have tried, for extended periods (months to years) various vegetarian and low-carb type diets - food composition actually matters very little.

Expand full comment

To clarify, that question is for Beth.

Expand full comment

Why do you think that?

Expand full comment

I didn't notice anyone here posturing against showing calories. Robin started out talking about subsidies, and suggested that people incorrectly estimate non-fast food categories. H.A and I had a discussion about calories on menus here. I am/was indifferent, I don't think there is much cost or benefit (possibly there is for non-fast food, but I'd like to see an experiment similar to the one discussed in the link).

Karl Smith (and some medical doctors") think "calories in minus calories out" is a very poor way of analyzing things.

Expand full comment