Label Makers Someday Congress will pass a law stating that all horses led to water will be required to drink. Sound crazy? That's almost as crazy as a new House of Representatives bill called the Menu Education and Labeling Act (also known as MEAL - cute, huh?), which mandates that if you lead customers into a restaurant it's your duty to make them think. Here's what I think: It's a terrible idea.
MEAL would require all chain restaurants that have more than 20 locations to provide four nutrition details beside every item that appears on their menus or menu boards. So for every burger, every order of bacon & cheddar-stuffed potato skins, and every bloomin' onion, menus will have to reveal total calories, trans-fat, saturated fat, and sodium. MEAL is specifically designed to "help curb obesity," according to its sponsor, Representative Rosa L. DeLauro. But if you read those four nutrition details again, the mainstream mindset of this would-be law is transparent. Apparently, Rep. DeLauro appears to still believe that saturated fat intake causes obesity. So knowing what we know about the key dietary elements that lead to obesity, what are the two glaring omissions from that list? All together now: Carbohydrates and sugars!
C'mon, Rosa, this isn't hard. Just read a few e-Alerts.
So, let's say that in the course of finding its way through the legislative maze, the bill is revised to include carbs and sugars. NOW you're addressing obesity. But there are still two huge problems with this bill: it's unnecessary and it's wasteful. It's unnecessary because most people don't go to chain restaurants for nutrition; they go for the convenience and the "comfort food." Imagine you're looking over a menu at your local Beefsteak Charlie's, McDonalds, T.G.I.Friday's - whatever - and you're hungry for some chicken. You know, I know, virtually everyone knows that fried chicken with French fries is going to have inferior nutritional value compared to, say, grilled chicken with steamed vegetables. It's a no-brainer: If you want good nutrition you choose the latter. But if you just want some comfort food, you'll probably end up with a plate of fried
chicken with a side of biscuits and gravy. In other words, you're all grown up. You don't need little nutrition panels to tell you which choice is healthier. And more to the point: It's not a menu's job to provide nutrition education.
The MEAL bill is also wasteful. Just imagine the millions of taxpayer dollars that will be required to put these regulations in place, monitor hundreds of thousands of restaurants nationwide, and then enforce penalties for restaurants that are caught serving 10 grams of saturated fats when the menu claimed 7. That will require a huge and expensive bureaucracy. Right. We need another one of those. And that's just how it will hit us on the tax side. As consumers, we'll have to pay for the additional costs the restaurants incur to redesign their menus and menu boards. Perhaps the most wasteful thing about the MEAL requirements is that most of the fast-food restaurants and chains already have the nutrition information available - either in pamphlets or on their websites - as Rosa admits. But that's not good enough. No, the consumer shouldn't have to look for the information, the restaurant should have to spend gobs of money to stick it in our faces. But more important than either of those arguments is this one: The chance that all that money and effort will help curb obesity is just about nil. In 1990, detailed nutrition labels began appearing on all food packaging. Those labels have proved useful and educational. But over the past 13 years obesity has become known as a national "epidemic." If those labels haven't done anything to keep the national waistline in check, it's absurdly optimistic to imagine that abbreviated menu labels will do the trick.
When Rep. DeLauro announced the introduction of MEAL she was joined by Senator Tom Harkin who plans to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. But Senator Harkin is going a step further. His bill will require nutritional labels on vending machines. There are probably bills pending in Congress that are more unnecessary and pointless than this one, but I doubt it. To Your Good Health, and… Go Ravens! Jenny Thompson
Health Sciences Institute Sources:
"DeLauro Introduces Menu Education and Labeling Act (MEAL to Help Curb Obesity" Press Release from Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, 11/5/03, house.gov
"Nutrition Labels for Fast Foods" National Public Radio, Morning Edition, 11/10/03, npr.org
"2 Democrats' Bills Target U.S. Obesity" Marguerite Higgins, The Washington Times, 11/6/03, washingtontimes.com
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