As the obesity epidemic in the United States and the rest of the world rises, different organizations are doing the best they can to halt the continuing of this health issue: now, FDA rules that restaurants will have to include a calorie count in their menus.
Trying to discourage unhealthy eating has been a top priority in many countries for quite a while now, particularly in organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration, also known as the FDA. In their latest attempt towards this, the new FDA rules state that restaurant menus will have to be more transparent now.
According to The Guardian, the new FDA rules were a consequence of months of studies from different scientists within the organization. For the new rules, the entity has worked around an economic concept called "consumer surplus," which calculates that people get benefits from different goods and services because these are not captured by market prices.
Mostly, the idea behind consumer surplus is that, when a product is banned, the pleasure that people lose from not consuming that good or service is the "cost" of the action.
However, other experts have knocked down the science behind the new FDA rules, saying that this doesn't apply when the product is not banned; in the case of the calorie count, they would only be making the information public, rather than banning the products altogether.
Among other things, the new FDA rules insist that places like large vending machine operators, amusement parks, movie theaters, chain restaurants and even grocery stores (when they sell prepared food) must add a calorie count to their products, a fact that should supposedly discourage people to consume high-fat foods in the future.
According to Reuters, regulators in the FDA have estimated that there will be about $5.27 billion of "lost pleasure" suffering from here on to the next 20 years, on account of restaurants and other food-selling places displaying the caloric value of the items they're selling.
This would supposedly keep consumers away from heavily fattening foods such as French fries, brownies, pizzas or any other number of junk food.
