United Liberty

Glenn Thrush digs deep into the House health care bill and finds a bit of Nanny Statism:

Buried deep in the House health care bill is a provision, likely to raise nanny-state hackles, requiring fast-food chains and vending machine owners to notify customers of calorie counts — by conspicuously posting nutritional information on menus or machines.

The provision — Section 2572 — requires retail food establishments “part of a chain with 20 or more locations” to list calorie counts “on the menu board including a drive-through board,” as is currently required in New York City and other localities.

A “vending machine operator shall provide a sign in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button” that includes similar data.

Exemptions include items that will be on the menu for less than 60 days — and limited test runs of food products.

It merges the language of Sen. Tom Carper’s LEAN Act the MEAL Act, sponsored by Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), earlier this year.

(…)

The idea is popular among progressives and public health types who think it could reduce obesity, hypertension and diabetes rates — particularly among inner-city folks whose diets are disproportionately composed of cheap, tasty, calorie-loaded Big Macs, Whoppers and Chalupas.

Recently, over at Reason, though, Steve Chapman pointed out that there’s little evidence that menu labeling laws like the one in New York City actually lead to changes in eating habits:

[T]he early evidence suggests that people don’t choose high-calorie fast foods because they don’t know any better. They choose them because they like them, and they don’t really care if others disapprove.

That’s the implication of a new study in the journal Health Affairs conducted by researchers at New York University and Yale University. They asked questions of and collected receipts from customers at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and KFC outlets in the city before and after the law took effect, and did the same in Newark, N.J., which has no such law.

The impact of the ordinance didn’t quite fulfill those fond expectations. To start with, only about half of the fast-food customers in New York said they noticed all this helpful information, and only a quarter of the patrons in this group said it made any difference in their choices.

Even those who said the data affected their decisions were fooling themselves. Before the law was implemented, the average customer in New York bought items containing 825 calories. Afterward, the figure was 846. In Newark, during the same time period, the typical patron went from 823 calories to 826.

In neither place did diners cut back on saturated fat, sodium, or sugar. The labeling law was the moral equivalent of the Chicago Olympics bid—lots of hype to little effect.

And, to put it bluntly:

[T]he sort of people who make a habit of eating at Burger King generally don’t put a high priority on a sound diet. Giving them nutritional information is a bit like recruiting for Greenpeace at a rifle range—a doomed enterprise. The people who are most likely to act on fast-food nutritional information are the ones least likely to encounter it, because they’re packing a lunch or eating at home.

And yet the Nanny State-ers continue to act.