Mandatory Menu Labeling Still a Flop

“Calorie labeling on menus hasn’t dramatically changed how many calories most people consume when they dine out, research is showing, four years after the Food and Drug Administration began requiring chain restaurants nationwide to post calorie counts,” NBC News reported last week. “Meanwhile, obesity rates have risen, from about 30 percent prevalence in 1999-2000 to 42 percent in 2017-2020.“

Forcing businesses to add calorie counts to their food menus, supporters contended, was supposed to have a dramatic impact on the food choices Americans make and on our waistlines. As I’ve explained previously, neither of those things has happened.

The federal menu-labeling mandate, which took effect in 2018 after years of delays, was adopted into law as part of Obamacare. The law, as I’ve explained, requires owners of chain restaurants, vending machines, groceries, movie theaters, and others to post total average calorie information for most of their menu items.

“The rules would be a disaster,” I explained in 2017, noting they would cost $1 billion to implement and that virtually every study published to date indicated menu labeling doesn’t improve consumer food choices or health.

Indeed, the NBC reports notes various studies that claim to have found calorie reductions ranging from 25 to 100 calories per person, per meal. If those numbers sound tiny, it’s because they are. For example, if a person who dined out 10 times each month—120 times each year—ate 25 fewer calories per meal and their diet remained otherwise unchanged, they’d lose less than one pound per year.

The NBC News report cited the opinions of researchers in the field. They’ve concluded mandatory menu labeling has made “not much of a difference,” promoted “a slight change,” or “did not have any impact that we could observe on people’s food purchasing behaviors.”

Even those tepid assessments of the impact of menu-labeling mandates are actually far rosier than other research has demonstrated overs the years. For example, a 2011 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, where I’ve served as a peer reviewer, found that one local menu-labeling m