Had to laugh at a recent story on one of Governor Mike Huckabee’s reports. He said, “You can lead a horse to low-calorie meals, but he’ll still eat like a horse. And so will humans.” He was quoting from a study in the American Journal of Public Health. The study’s authors were two researchers from Cornell and the University of Pittsburgh who stood outside McDonald’s restaurants in New York and passed out fliers containing information on just how many calories men and women should eat for lunch. Huckabee also said the researchers “Discovered all that helpful information not only didn’t make people eat less, they actually ate more. Men consumed 11 percent more calories than the flier recommended, and women ate 27 percent more. In fact, people who read the diet advice actually ate more calories than those who didn’t read it. They’re not sure why. Maybe it gave them a false sense of security: a Big Mac had slightly fewer calories than the maximum, so they ordered fries and a large Coke to go with it. It does mean, though, that if you think that government forcing restaurants to post calorie counts of all their foods is going to make Americans eat less, then you’ll probably swallow anything.” True..Governor Huckabee..true..But the Los Angeles Times in its story about that study said, “A previous study that tested the value of posting calorie information on menus found that it did steer diners toward lower-calorie meals. But in that study, conducted at a Subway sandwich shop, it only worked for customers who had a healthy BMI (Body Mass Index), not those who were overweight. The authors of the new study speculated that they got different results because Subway and McDonald’s “have different reputations for healthful fare, and, as a result, may attract different clientele. But that hardly made them optimistic that their approach would work better under different circumstances.The results provide little hope that calorie recommendations will salvage the apparent weak or nonexistent effect of menu labeling,” they concluded. If a person wants to get fat, let them get fat. If a person wants to stay thin, let them stay thin. Don’t academics have anything better to do than conduct studies designed to protect us against ourselves?
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 08:11:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015