Just for the record, you’ll consume 78 of those meals where you buy them, take 58 of them home, eat 34 of them in your car and take 23 of them to work. <\/p>\n
That’s a tidy number of meals, a little more than one every other day, and it highlights the recent debate over whether to post the calories contained in food items on the menus at those restaurants. The essence of the debate is: Do such postings actually do any good, as measured by whether they significantly influence how many calories the patrons order? <\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n So far, the handful of studies on the subject tend to contradict one another: posting seems to reduce calorie intake in some circumstances, and not in others. But a bit of clarity may be at hand, thanks to one of the serious heavyweights in health education, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, which just reported a research project involving more than 300 restaurant customers.<\/p>\n The essentials: One-third of the diners were given menus with calorie listings for the entrees, one-third of them got menus with calorie listings and a printed reminder that the recommended daily calorie load for a typical adult is 2,000, and a third got menus with no caloric information. <\/p>\n The last group wound up consuming around 1,630 calories at dinner and later in the evening. The first group, by comparison, consumed . . . around 1,630 calories. <\/p>\n It looks pretty gloomy for the pro-posting advocates, but wait: the second group, those who got the postings and the daily limit reminder, put away just 1,380 calories. That’s a difference of 250 calories per meal, no small potatoes when you multiply it by 193 restaurant meals, which gets you a total of 48,250 calories a year, the rough equivalent of at least one clothing size. <\/p>\n This experiment will have to be repeated with considerably more test subjects in more eating establishments located in more geographical areas, especially if the restaurant industry has anything to say about it, but if the results hold, we’ve learned something fairly important weight-control-wise: we tend to take calories more seriously, and consume them accordingly, when we know how much of our healthy daily allotment they use up. <\/p>\n To really be effective, perhaps the postings shouldn’t even be in numbers of calories, but in the percentage of a healthy daily intake that they represent. At least the math would be a bit easier.<\/p>\n (By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)<\/p>\n From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News<\/a> (REF3076322B7)<\/p>\n To post calories on menus or not to post: There may be an answer<\/a><\/p>\nIt turns out that the key element is context<\/h3>\n