Labeling the amount of calories in food (for example on McDonald’s restaurant menus) totally fails to change people’s eating behaviors at all, no matter how hard people study it.
The effect may be too small to measure, but I can personally attest that it is at least 1 in 7.057 billion.
While my grocery shopping is strongly determined by nutritional label content, my behavior at restaurants only weakly is, and I think this is related to the fact that so few restaurants offer that service in the first place. If I’m going to a restaurant at all, I’m in the habit of taking for granted that I will only be able to guess at the nutritional content of the meal I’m ordering, and will therefore be taking a break from deciding on the basis of labeling (as an aside, I have an enormous appetite, and can eat a meal meant for three and have room for dessert afterwards despite weighing under 75 kg. I’m used to eating until I’m only fractionally full, but will sometimes have “break” meals at restaurants or on holidays, so my restaurant eating isn’t that indicative of my usual diet.)
If restaurants routinely listed caloric content of their menu items, instead of the places that do so mostly being fast food chains which I tend to avoid in the first place due to their reputations for low quality and unhealthy food, it might be a significantly stronger determining factor in what I order.
ETA: When I was mostly reliant on a college cafeteria for food (which is in many ways more similar to a restaurant than a grocery,) I was strictly dependent on nutrition labels to choose what I ate, and if anything was unlabeled, or I suspected it was mislabeled, I wouldn’t eat it.
The effect may be too small to measure, but I can personally attest that it is at least 1 in 7.057 billion.
While my grocery shopping is strongly determined by nutritional label content, my behavior at restaurants only weakly is, and I think this is related to the fact that so few restaurants offer that service in the first place. If I’m going to a restaurant at all, I’m in the habit of taking for granted that I will only be able to guess at the nutritional content of the meal I’m ordering, and will therefore be taking a break from deciding on the basis of labeling (as an aside, I have an enormous appetite, and can eat a meal meant for three and have room for dessert afterwards despite weighing under 75 kg. I’m used to eating until I’m only fractionally full, but will sometimes have “break” meals at restaurants or on holidays, so my restaurant eating isn’t that indicative of my usual diet.)
If restaurants routinely listed caloric content of their menu items, instead of the places that do so mostly being fast food chains which I tend to avoid in the first place due to their reputations for low quality and unhealthy food, it might be a significantly stronger determining factor in what I order.
ETA: When I was mostly reliant on a college cafeteria for food (which is in many ways more similar to a restaurant than a grocery,) I was strictly dependent on nutrition labels to choose what I ate, and if anything was unlabeled, or I suspected it was mislabeled, I wouldn’t eat it.