I strongly disagree with this recent NYT Op/Ed about the value of calorie posting requirements.  Based on a study of McDonalds customers, they conclude that people don’t modify their behaviour based on posted calories in those restaurants.  Anyone see the SERIOUS GAPING FLAW in that logic?  (If it helps, I italicized it for you.)

As someone who has recently lost a whole bunch of weight, I can testify to the obvious and basic fact that the most important thing to control your weight is to measure calories consumed and compare that with calories exerted via normal daily activity plus exercise.  Some people call this “energy balance” — but the easiest way think of your body like it’s an engine in a car:  Eating food == filling up at the gas station and exercise == using the car’s engine to drive around.  By controlling the inputs and outputs, you can basically hit any level you want to!

Once you grasp this extremely simple logic, shedding excess points is astonishingly easy.  You count your calories in by adding up what you eat in a day (there are lots of websites that help you do that), and figure out how much you expend in a day (again, lots of tools to figure that out).  If you intake less than you exert, you’ll lose weight — that’s it — no magic, no BS.  If reality doesn’t match your expectation, you’re either miscounting inputs or outputs — you can create a simple and effective feedback loop to manage this by adjusting your average calories in or out per day.

The hardest part thus becomes eating out — in many cases you have no idea what the restaurant put into the food, so you’re unable to see how many calories you are taking in.  If you can’t measure your rate of intake, you can’t make informed decisions to achieve your goals.  Thus, if a goal of public health policy is to give people the tools they need in order to improve their health (and it should be), then requiring chains to post calories makes a bucketload of good sense.  It’s not the full solution, basic education is also required to explain to people what the numbers mean and provide context, but it’s an essential and required step.