Obamacare Calorie Count Rules Ushered In

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/obamacare-calorie-count-rules-ushered-in

by mgdo • 8 years ago

28 99 8 years ago

airstrike3• 8 years ago

Restaurants will also have to provide on-site additional nutritional information, such as fat and sodium levels.

Can we please talk about sugar? It's objectively worse than just "fat" as not all fats are created equal and certain kinds are actually really important.

thaumasiotes3• 8 years ago

Sugars are really important too, if that's your metric. That's why they taste good.

alextheparrot• 8 years ago

Lead tastes good too, taste is not equivalent to importance.

m-watson3• 8 years ago

You can (and should) say the exact same thing about sugars as you did about fats. There is a healthy way to eat sugars, fats, and proteins. They are all important and what it usually comes down to is the age old saying "all things in moderation."

toomuchtodo• 8 years ago

Fat and protein are healthier for you than sugar. Sugar should be your least consumed macro. All things in moderation is a cop out.

airstrike3• 8 years ago

Yes, there is a healthy way to eat sugar: limit it to waaaay below what you think a low level is. Max ~30g per day from complex carbs is a good rule-of-thumb. That's what you'll get from eating a banana, one serving of 0% greek yogurt and a handful of carrots.

janitor61• 8 years ago

There's also a healthy way to eat arsenic - in moderation - about 12.5 μg/day

s73v3r_2• 8 years ago

As someone who is starting to watch what they eat, and try to watch calories as well as other nutrition things, I'm glad this is happening, but I wish it was possible for it to apply more broadly, too. For that, I guess, it would need to be easier/cheaper to get the nutrition of a recipe than it is now.

sbenitoj24• 8 years ago

Congrats on starting! That’s the hardest part. As someone who helps people lose weight professionally, I’m curious to hear what program, if any, you found and how did you decide to do it? (I’m not selling anything, just curious).

s73v3r_2• 8 years ago

I had been going to the gym, but I was frustrated with the crappy heart rate monitors on the cardio machines there. I was also looking for a replacement for my Pebble Time, so I got the new Fitbit Versa. It works pretty well, and has a nice feature of giving me a "calorie budget," telling me about how much I can eat.

So far, though, the hardest part is estimating how many calories are in something, and how much of something I'm eating.

keithnz2• 8 years ago

In new zealand we have http://www.foodstandards.govt.nz/consumer/labelling/panels/P...

and Mcdonalds for instance... https://mcdonalds.co.nz/sites/mcdonalds.co.nz/files/Nutritio...

which is great if you care about it. But generally if you care about such things you have a pretty good idea for most foods anyways. Though, there are a few foods that it's not entirely obvious there's lots of sugar in them.

keithnz2• 8 years ago

Maybe it's just me because I don't know how the US works, but when trying to find the official information for this, it seems like none of the news agencies I found via googling reference official information, they just reference their own news about things officials said. Eventually I found a reference to a fda document. Seemed painful to find though.

https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/Guidan...

pkaye• 8 years ago

The USDA already keeps a publically available food database (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list) of most of this information. Its just that now restaurants need to make it more prominent at the time of order.

PinkMilkshake• 8 years ago

Yeah, I remember when US products like Dr Pepper first started showing up in NZ they would have a sticky label over the top of the nutrition info with a more compliant one.

sbenitoj24• 8 years ago

As someone who helps people lose fat professionally, I can say with near 100% confidence this will have almost zero effect on the vast majority of people.

People were lean long before calorie counts were readily available, the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food.

The problem is philosophical — if you think all edible substances qualify as “food,” you’re never going to lose weight and keep it off.

If you think you should only be consuming whole foods the VAST majority of the time, then you will lose weight and keep it off relatively effortlessly.

danhak• 8 years ago

As someone who has lost 20 pounds since the new year, I can say with near 100% confidence that it would not have happened for me without obsessive calorie tracking. Can't recommend MyFitnessPal enough.

sbenitoj24• 8 years ago

It won’t last, calorie counts are not reliable indicators of how many calories you’re actually digesting (look up the thermic effect of food), and long term you will not keep it off if you focus solely on calories, quality whole foods come first.

NegativeLatency• 8 years ago

Great job. Don’t listen to the haters. :)

jonknee3• 8 years ago

Restaurants being required to show calories may change menus in a way that cannot help but have an effect for everybody. It incentivizes having lower calorie options, disincentives healthy sounding but not really items like some salads and disincentives really over the top items.

Even if that doesn't pan out, it certainly makes life easier for the millions who do count calories.

jobigoud• 8 years ago

the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food

Maybe that's not the problem but it could be part of a solution. Don't underestimate gamification and feedback loops.

What type of awareness are we talking about? I imagine a progress bar telling you precisely where you are for the day and the week, now you have to consciously break the ceiling if you want to eat too much.

sbenitoj24• 8 years ago

I’m all for anything that helps people, including gamification.

But if your focus is calories, and not the quality/source if your food, then you’re not solving the REAL problem which is distorted hormone levels affecting how full you feel. Junk food causes you to be hungrier than you should be.

Look around, no other mammal is overweight other than humans, and most humans weren’t overweight until junk food wasn’t invented.

maxerickson• 8 years ago

Why just eat whole foods when you could mostly eat dank foods?

drak0n1c• 8 years ago

As a skinny young man with a big appetite I've found myself using these calorie counts as a way to maximize calories for the lowest price.

josephorjoe• 8 years ago

I use to be like that (the snickers bar had the best calories/price ratio in the office vending machine), but I'm not any more (the popcorn has the lowest calories in the office vending machine).

Something very unfortunate happened to my metabolism in my 30s... do enjoy it while you can :)

themodelplumber• 8 years ago

As a formerly obese person and big loser with almost infinite capacity for stress eating, I love the calorie counts for all of the times they've helped me when I've been in calculation mode (which is healthy, for my personality dynamic). Sometimes a vague-sandwich is all it takes to get off the rails and put my old, bad habits in the driver's seat again.

BTW back when I weighed around 300 lbs. I remember buying a box of Little Debbie's peanut butter snacks for the exact reason you stated (and eating it all). Major calorie density for cost. That became a sort of pornographic activity for me, building up energy stores outside of any real energy-risk context.

sbenitoj24• 8 years ago

This is the point I made below, whole foods are superior to calorie counts

No one eats a grass-fed steak and goes into a downward spiral.

Tons of people spiral out of control if they consume even small amounts of junk food.

WHAT you eat matters more than HOW MUCH you eat long term.

Calories matter, but different foods affect your body differently!

ProfessorLayton2• 8 years ago

Heh, I occasionally shop at 99¢ stores, and am often amazed at how many calories one can buy for a dollar.

Chocolate pound cake is the clear winner (not counting items that are just ingredients like cooking oil etc.): 900kcal/99¢! (~1.09 after tax where I live)

chrisseaton2• 8 years ago

Is vegetable oil better? Or what about sugar or syrup?

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 8 years ago

A 10oz jar of creamy peanut butter from the dollar store has ~1700 Calories.

shawn2• 8 years ago

The most effective labels we could have are "Added sugar" and "Added corn starch".

If you show exactly how much extra sugar and corn starch you're consuming, it's much harder to get fat by accident.

jonknee3• 8 years ago

Do you mean added corn syrup? Cornstarch is useful in the kitchen, but isn't super common in processed food (I assume they have better thickeners!).

shawn2• 8 years ago

Eh, if we're being precise:

dextrose, maltodextrin, pretty much anything that's -ose or dex-, corn starch, corn syrup, added sugar, wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, legumes, dairy.

I cut all of those and ended up losing weight without exercising. YMMV.

A decent rule of thumb is that if a 5yo can pronounce all the ingredients, it's probably ok.

Latty4• 8 years ago

Calorie counts are all that really matters when it comes to "getting fat" - while obviously that doesn't mean healthy - sugar isn't any more relevant to getting fat than anything else.

Now, there are easy wins from sugars - particularly if you are drinking lots of regular soft drinks, you can reduce your calorie intake relatively easily by cutting them out, but everyone's diet is different.

EpicEng5• 8 years ago

sugar isn't any more relevant to getting fat than anything else.

That's not quite true. High sugar intake results in an insulin spike, which in turn results in more fat being stored than would be had you eaten the same number of calories in the form of e.g. protein. Sugar also results in more net calories per calorie as it takes very little energy to digest.

From a behavioral perspective (this matters!), sugar does not leave you feeling full. You can talk calories all day, but when it comes to weight loss you have to factor in how people actually work. A full person is less likely to overeat than a hungry one.

wahern• 8 years ago

Calorie count gets you most of the benefit with a small fraction of the cost--in compliance as well as in information overload.

California's Proposition 65 is a great example of how detail and context matter. The carcinogen warnings are so ubiquitous that they've become meaningless if not counterproductive.

Don't overlook the fact that people aren't stupid. A sugar label for soda or ice cream has little value. A sugar label for a burger bun is almost equally useless in terms of epidemiological impact because of the relatively minimal amount, especially once you consider how it would effects the signal/noise ratio of all mandatory disclosures taken together.

You also have to consider other avenues for messaging. What was most effective in reducing smoking (directly or indirectly--i.e. shifting the culture): labels on cigarette packs, early interventions, or public marketing campaigns. I would argue the latter.

derekp7• 8 years ago

I think a good proxy for what you should and should not be eating is how much you enjoy the food. If you really enjoy it a lot, then it is easy to over do it. However if it is mostly palatable, but doesn't give you that feeling of bliss (compare salad without dressing vs. pizza or chocolate cake), then you won't be necessarily going back for seconds/thirds once full.

Of course, this can be mitigated if the food has a negative feedback cycle. I'm that way with shellfish, after a certain amount it becomes nasty tasting. Same with a good steak, after I've eaten enough I can't imagine shoving more down. But with pizza, I always go back for that second or third slice.

sundvor• 8 years ago

Outsider's view:

As a Norwegian, when I visited Boston in 1999 for an Allaire dev conference I saw more grossly fat / obese people in the _hour_ spent switching flights at Newark airport than I had in my (then) home country in the preceding year. I was really taken aback.

There's clearly a lot of things the US is not doing right on many, many levels. This could help chip (sorry) away at that.

gremlinsinc• 8 years ago

"Daren Bakst, a fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the law equates to government overreach.

'It’s not up to the government to influence what people eat — that should be left up to each individual,' he said."

I wonder if he has the same 'feels' about legalizing all illegal drugs? Seems most conservatives only support laws that fit their 'narrative'.. I'm obese, I sit and code all day, and I don't think people 'should' do lsd/weed/heroine/etc... but I don't think they should go to jail if they end up in the rat-trap of addiction. It's a mental health issue, and the distribution lines should be only ones policed imho..

But why is the DEA not government overreach for enforcing 'possession' but listing calorie counts so people can purposefully limit intake is?

Obamacare Calorie Count Rules Ushered In

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