Restaurants lower the calorie count in menus

America is the birthplace of a multitude of fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and many more. Perhaps not coincidentally, the U.S. is also facing an obesity epidemic: In 2012, more than one-third of adults were obese. However, a new study has found that restaurants have started voluntarily lowering the calorie count of their menus.

The study was conducted by the Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and it found that large chain restaurants have started introducing menu items that are significantly lower in calorie content.

Sara Bleich an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at JHSPH and the lead author of the study, was driven to research this phenomenon more when her team suspected that this trend could be due to the implementation of new federal government rules requiring all restaurants to list their calorie counts.

“Restaurants want to reduce the potential consumer shock when they see the listed high calories in their offerings,” Bleich said.

Their research showed that the mean calorie count for newly introduced items in 2013 was 60 calories less than the year before. Most of the reduced food items fell under the categories of new main course items, beverages and the children’s menu. However, restaurants with signature foods (like burgers or pizza) didn’t introduce much of a caloric reduction in their core menu. 

Studies have shown that on any given day, nearly a third of Americans eat at fast-food restaurants with an average intake of 191 calories, 404 calories and 315 calories among young children, adolescents and adults, respectively.

“Among kids, the increase in obesity can already be explained by an excess of about 165 daily calories,” said Bleich. Thus, a decrease of just 12 percent of calories in menu items can potentially reduce the obesity rates and improve overall health conditions.

The introduction of lower calorie content foods by restaurants can also circumvent the issue of trying to get the public to change their eating habits, since it is easier to offer healthier selections from the supply-side of things. Getting individuals to change their eating behaviors themselves would prove to be a lot more challenging.

According to Bleich, Americans also generally don’t have a good concept of what their necessary daily calorie intake should be — thus, having the calorie counts listed on menus may not be useful. People who do know their individual calorie requirement may not be mathematically proficient enough to calculate the calories from the meal as a proportion of their total caloric intake. Hence, Bleich aruges that giving the public more options for selecting healthier food would be a more effective method for improving the average American diet.

Although it can’t be distinctly correlated, Bleich and her team suspect that large chain restaurants have taken the extra effort for introducing lower calorie-count foods due to the future implementation of the federal menu-labeling provisions, as outlined in the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

This, along with the resultant increase in transparency of calorie information, has the potential to create a sustainable and lasting improvement on not only the nation’s obesity rates, but also health conditions in general.