The movie “Fat Head” made fun of this very idea.
The government mindset is that people are too stupid to realize that McDonald’s food is fattening and bad for you. So he went up to people on the street holding a tray with McDonald’s food and asked:
1) Is this food healthy or unhealthy to eat?
2) Will eating this food make you fat?
Everyone, absolutely everyone, knew it was unhealthy and would make you fat.
We don’t need a paternalistic govt to point out what we already know.
Not all Mcdees food is fattening. I like when restaurants list the cal. I can them make a informed decision on what I want to eat or not...just as I look at the labels on packages of food in stores.
Sometimes you don't know what the calories are in certain foods at restaurants even though it appears healthy or has mainly healthy ingredients...sometimes it fools you. I was getting what I thought was a healthy cranberry/apple/chicken salad at a place-thought it has maybe 500-600 cal and looked at their website later and it was 1450 cal.
A person is healthy or not healthy.
Food (once it is inanimate) is healthful or not healthful.
That’s English.
What you really need are the grams of carbohydrates (diabetics and dieters can actually use that information) and possibly the fat content ~ although that needs to be divided up into a number of categories to inform people with specific conditions of what they need to know.
Protein might be useful ~
Then "everyone" doesn't know what they're talking about. Food is not bad or good. It's just food. This good food/bad food dichotomy is used often by the know nothings to inspire the bans that conservatives should abhor.
This emotional and anti-science thinking also perpetuates the nonsensical claim that food can be separated into two categories: good and bad. The reality is that there is no bad food...only bad diets. And this, combined with a serious lack of physical activity in a sedentary country, is why Americans are fat.
McDonald's food is not fattening if you don't eat more of it than you burn. You can get fat from eating "healthy" food if you eat too much of it. Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories as day when he's in training, and he admits that he loves so called "junk food." I don't think anyone, at least with a brain, would consider Phelps unhealthy.
In response to the stupidity of the "Super Sized" movie that nanny statists cheered, two researchers did their own study on McDonald's food and lost weight by eating nothing but "fattening" items from the McDonald's menu. They ate chocolate shakes and Double Quarter Pounders for an entire month, but unlike the "Super Size" idiot, they got regular exercise and lost weight during the month even though they ate, on average, about 4000 calories a day.
Placing the calorie content of food on a menu won't do a damned thing to reduce the incidence of obesity in this country. If operators want to do it then that's fine. But to compel businesses to do this is nanny statism at its finest.