About Me

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What is there to say? I am a 24 year old student pursuing a degree in nutrition/dietetics. I happen to be a caring person. I care about people, animals, and the environment. I enjoy learning. I love to learn from others. I enjoy reading and watching documentaries about health, psychology, philosophy, religion, politics, and nature. Welcome to this little veg*n's world = )

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Wake Up! And Read the Calorie Labels!

After reading the article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25464987/ and watching the video:


I was pleasantly surprised with this ruling by New York that forces restaurants to post caloric information about their products. Admittedly, my hopes are that this goes to a national level or is spread nationwide.

Why? I see more pros than cons.

Pros:
Nutrition information influences better decisions, typically.
It costs very little, if anything, to the restaurant when placing this information on menus or boards (they already have the information, after all).

Cons:
It might cost the a small fee to remake standard or premade/printed menus.
Consumers may somehow resist information that they do not enjoy seeing/hearing and would rather live in denial of their unhealthy habits.

I do sound biased in this. I am, of course, for this. I have always been in favor of better nutritional information. When it doesn't appear to harm anyone (except maybe minimal cost to menu changes), I have to think why not? The aim is to help the public make better decisions. If this does just that, we should see a trend of weight loss and diseases associated with bad eating habits.

Of course, nutritional information has been posted on boxes for years but many people overlook them, ignore them, or just don't take the time to understand them. Will this be much different? I think it will have a slightly better effect than those on the boxes and packaging labels but time will tell.

Your thoughts?

1 comment:

Gregatron said...

Interesting read.

I saw your link here on the facebook StL vegetarian group. I thought I would say hello. I would have messaged your on fb but the account seems to be inactive. So anyway, here is my stl veggie blog -- was thinking about putting up the link on the fb group page.

http://stlveg.blogspot.com/