I’ve seen information on today’s hearing of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygene cropping up in many news outlets, including the BBC. Here’s a bit of what the New York Times has to say on the matter:
But the New York City Board of Health, the city’s powerful arbiter of public health rules, is considering a plan to make it much harder to avoid the cold, hard numbers by requiring some of New York’s 20,000 restaurants, including outlets of the nation’s fast-food chains, to list calories on menus and on clearly displayed menu boards.[...]
The proposal was lost amid the other much splashier recommendation the board is considering to prohibit the city’s restaurants from serving food containing more than a tiny amount of trans fats, the chemically modified ingredients considered by doctors and nutritionists to increase the risk of heart disease.
Perhaps part of the reason that this got lost is that the idea isn’t quite as annoyingly intrusive as a complete ban on transfats. Making people more blatantly aware of the health consequences of their food choices is not a bad idea, I think. However, to deny people the option to make bad decisions is over the line, in my opinion.
The NYT article mentions that only a (relatively) few restaurants would be impacted — those that have standardized dishes, and already make nutritional information available. Those facilities would have to display calorie counts as prominently as they display the price.
Considering the software available to analyize the nutritional metrics of food, I think it might be within reach to extend that to all eateries, not just a few fast food outlets which might be tempted to circumvent the rule by withholding their nutritional facts in an effort to avoid the “already available” clause.
In other news, I happened to notice that KFC is planning to drop transfats from their products, prompted by the threat of a ban in NYC.