California Fighting the War on Obesity

July 1, 2009 by nctrower
Filed under California Restaurant Law, Jumpstart Your Metabolism

California becomes the first state in the nation to pass a new law aimed at reducing obesity and heart disease. Starting today, July 1st, 2009 restaurants with at least 20 locations have to reveal the number of calories in most of the food on their menus.

These restaurants can either list the calories in their standard items on menus and indoor menu boards or they can offer customers brochures listing the amount of calories, saturated fat, salt and carbohydrates in those items.

Starting in 2011, the calorie counts in standard menu items — food and drinks the restaurants sell at least half the year — will have to be listed on menus and indoor menu boards. Drive-through customers will have to be offered brochures providing nutritional information.

Of course many of the fast food chains resisted this change. Well why not? If people really knew what they were eating, they MIGHT reconsider their food choices. However, there are so many people that could care less so it probably wouldn’t affect their bottom line anyway. Can you imagine anyone asking you at the drive thru window, “Would you like 620 calories and 32 grams of fat with that?”

It’s a great start to educate more people on nutrition, although we have a long way to go to before we will see results. It’s neat to see California leading in something more positive than the typical highest rates of foreclosure states.

I ran across this great article from the Mother Nature Network Top 10 Organic Fast Food Restaurants and I thought I’d share it here. Many of these restaurants aren’t even here in my local area in southern California. Even if they were, I would still scrutinize the calorie counts and ingredients list. There are so many artificial trans fats that I would like to avoid among other things.

So what do you think? Do you think people will be more conscious of their food intake as result of this new law?