Calorie Counts On Menus Make People Healthier: Study

Ever start to order that 12-piece nugget meal but go for the 8-count instead after seeing the calorie listing on the menu? Downsize the large fry to a medium or small so you don’t get so many calories?

You aren’t alone, a new study suggests.

Body Mass Index decreases significantly for some people when laws are enacted that require national chain restaurants to put calorie labels on their menus, researchers found.

For men:

• “Normal weight” men benefitted only a little.
  
• Overweight men saw significant decreases.
• Obese men had the biggest drop of the three.

For women:

• Decreases were only found in overweight women.
• “Normal weight” and obese women had little to no significant change.

BMI is a ratio of height and weight that health officials use to measure body fat. For example, a healthy person who is 5 feet 9 inches tall should weigh between 128 and 162 pounds, according to the CDC. Someone who is 6’2” should weigh between 148 and 186 pounds.

Partha Deb, a health economics professor at Hunter College and one of the study’s co-authors, said he was pretty skeptical that the data would show anything conclusive when the idea was first proposed by one of his students, Carmen Vargas.

But after trying his hardest to poke holes in the numbers, he told Patch that he decided, “It’s pretty darn robust. I’m converted.”

The study, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used data from an annual, nationwide Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey that contains self-reported height, weight and demographic information.

Researchers looked at before-and-after BMI data for people ages 21 to 75 in some areas that implemented calorie-publishing laws. They compared the data over the same time period to people in places that hadn’t implemented the law.

“If all of a sudden, you were randomly assigned to a place that had the law, the law came to your town, all else equal, that would be the change in your BMI,” Deb explained about the number-crunching behind the study’s results.

The researchers also split up men and women into three groups — normal weight, overweight and obese — based on a calculation of weights within the sample that ended up being close to the CDC’s definitions.

Overweight women had a BMI decrease of .9 percent. Overweight men had a decrease of 1.4 percent, and obese men dropped their BMI by 2 percent.

The study found virtually no change in BMI for women of normal weight and only a .55-percent change in normal-weight men.

The study suggests that people who are overweight have more of an incentive to change their eating habits compared to people who aren’t.

“Calorie-labeling laws may have largest impacts for the overweight and obese because they are most sensitive to the information,” the study says.

“Calorie-labeling laws have very small impacts among individuals who are normal weight because they have no reason to change their behavior on the basis of the new information.”

And why could it be more pronounced in men with women?

“The reason I think you see it more with men than women, I think women are already marginally more careful to what they eat and pay attention to stuff anyway,” Deb said.

• Read the full calorie labeling study here.