A lot of jokes have been crafted over the last week or so with KFC’s vaguely evil chicken-cheese-bacon-chicken sandwich as the punchline, but one of the things that’s so surprising about the reaction to it is that, nutritionally speaking, there really isn’t anything about it that is especially outrageous as far as fast food goes. 540 calories/32 grams of fat/1380 mgs of sodium? A vegetarian burrito from Chipotle, topped with cheese and guacamole, has a lot more calories and fat.* A Maoz falafel sandwich, and stuffed with eggplant, feta cheese, and hummus can easily creep into Double Down territory. These are chains who notably trumpet their fare as a fresher (and implicitly healthier) alternative to McDonald’s and the like.
I’ve been thinking about this nutritional tut-tutting on the Double Down in the wake of some dispiriting results on an initiative implemented by Mayor Bloomberg here in NYC which required chain restaurants to display how many calories the items contain on the menu. The idea was that better-informed customers would make healthier decisions. But a study found that the plan didn’t have much effect.
The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains — McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken — in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.
It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.
But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.
The findings, to be published Tuesday in the online version of the journal Health Affairs come amid the spreading popularity of calorie-counting proposals as a way to improve public health across the country.
“I think it does show us that labels are not enough,” Brian Elbel, an assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine and the lead author of the study, said in an interview.
Like a lot of people, I thought this was a worthwhile initiative. But it seems like a fundamental problem with a this effort is that the numbers, in and of themselves, don’t mean a lot or explain much to a lot of people. How much of your daily intake is 600 calories? That kinda depends, doesn’t it? It might be more useful to know how much fat, sugar and sodium was in a given item, but that stuff isn’t displayed on the menus. But even including those would call for context: Twenty-three grams of fat! Well, what kind of fat are we talking about? And so many people will simply eyeball it. A lot of times, the appearance of healthfulness — like say, lots of fresh vegetables on your lunch salad — can camouflage all manner of dietary profligacy (dressing, cheese, etc.); it seems the Double Down’s biggest crime is actually looking the part.
(Aside: I’d guess another part of the dilemma is that so few people actually know how much we eat in a given day. A friend of mine who was about to embark on a weightloss regimen was inquiring as to what she should do to start. When it was suggested that she get a sense of how many calories she consumed each day to see what she could cut out, she guessed she ate about 1200. It was very unlikely that that was true; that’s the kind of caloric intake usually reserved for people who are dieting very aggressively — and maybe dangerously — or who are malnourished. Likewise, the nutritional labeling on food products is based on a 2000=calorie diet, which may seem like a lot of nutritional breathing room until you realize what an actual serving size of a given product is, or if you regularly drink soda or grab a drink at Starbucks. )
Thinking on this, though, it shouldn’t be surprising that the calorie-posting plan came up wanting. Large-scale efforts to combat obesity-related illnesses will be stymied by the array of obstacles for poor and lower-income people, who are of course, much more likely to be obese at the same time they are much more likely to be undernourished. At the risk of belaboring the point, it’s much easier to live a healthier lifestyle if you live in a place that encourages walking, where there is an abundance of healthful food options, and if you have the time and money to be active — you’ll end up making healthier choices by default. The fast food labeling might even be besides the point in such places, since those communities are less likely to have fast food spots to begin with.
But if you live in a world in which the Double Down is more accessible than fresh chicken breasts, or if you work a grueling job where cooking at home becomes a burden in itself, or if you’re poor and a big factor in what you decide to eat is to get the most calories you can for as little money as possible, or you live in a place that is so physically unsafe that physical activity is not an option, then prominently displaying calories on a takeout menu is going to have little effect on community health. Despite all the talk about willpower and personal agency when it comes to diet and fitness, it’s worth remembering that very few of us become healthy or unhealthy in a vacuum.
*Via.