Having His Cake and Eating It Too

With all due respect, your arguments are complete nonsense. You seem to be saying that listing calorie counts on restaurant menus is inherently a form of harassment of people who eat there. If that's the case, shopping in grocery stores must already be a humiliating and traumatic experience, since U.S. law requires foods in grocery stores to be labeled with nutrition information that includes not just calories, but carbohydrates, fat content, sodium, sugar, etc.

If you want to avoid the "guilt" of knowing how many calories are in the food you eat, of course you have the option of not reading the nutritional information, just as many (probably most) people don't read the nutritional labels on grocery store foods. It's absurd, however, to suggest that this information should not be made available to consumers. Currently it is simply impossible to obtain meaningful nutritional information from many restaurants, including some of the large chains. Here, for example, is the "nutritional information" page on the website of Outback Steakhouses:

http://www.outback.com/foodandmenus/nutritionalinfo.aspx

You'll notice that the word "calorie" does not even appear anywhere on the page, or anywhere else on their website -- not terribly surprising, since their "appetizers" alone include items like the "Bloomin' Onion w. Dressing" ([http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070803231428AA5E6qr 2310 calories]) and "Aussie Cheese Fries" ([http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-appetizers-aussie-tizers-aussie-cheese-fries_f-Y2lkPTI3NzM2JmJpZD0xMzM1JmZpZD04ODk1OSZlaWQ9MjQ1ODgwNTY5JnBvcz0zJnBhcj0ma2V5PU91dGJhY2sgU3RlYWtob3VzZQ.html 2900 calories]), either of which by itself would exceed the 2,000 calories per day established by the FDA as the Daily Reference Value for a normal adult.

First of all, you seem to be suggesting that fat people are the only people who have an interest in knowing how many calories are in the food being served at restaurants. This of course, is not the case. Everyone (fat or thin) has the right to know how many calories are in the food they eat, just as they have the right to know how much sodium it contains, how many carbohydrates, how much protein, fiber, saturated fat, sugar, etc. For some people, such as diabetics, this information can be vitally important to their health. To suggest that it should be kept off of restaurant menus so that fat people won't have to worry about what other people think of them is to argue that everyone's right to information should be held hostage to the sensitivities of one segment of the population. Moreover, most of the disapproval you describe comes, not from nutrition information (or lack of it) on restaurant menus, but rather from the fact that fat people LOOK fat, and society stigmatizes their appearance. (I agree that this is an often unfair prejudice, but it doesn't come from calorie counts.)

At one point you seem to agree with me on this point. You write that there are "social delusions that fat people are happily munching away on junk food, oblivious to the health warnings around them." If indeed this were a social delusion, you would have nothing to fear from the inclusion of nutritional information on restaurant menus, and in fact you should welcome this information, in the expectation that it would change "the judgments of their dining companions and wait staff." You are therefore contradicting yourself when you claim that this information is a source of stigma against fat people.

As for whether nutritional labels make a difference, they clearly do. They make a difference to me, for example. When I'm shopping in the grocery store, I find it valuable to know that one brand of yogurt contains 170 calories and 32 grams of carbohydrates, while another brand (which tastes just as good and makes me feel just as full) contains 80 calories and 14 grams of carbohydrates. I use this sort of information to make decisions when shopping at the grocery store, and I should have the same right to make informed choices when I'm at a restaurant.

This information is important, not because everyone should feel pressured to conform to some ideal standard of what their bodies should look like, but because obesity (which is caused in part by poor diet) carries real health risks including heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. Knowing what is in the foods we eat can help people who want to reduce those risks.

Finally, you are simply wrong when you suggest that the pharmaceutical industry has a "financial agenda" that benefits from restaurants providing better nutritional information. To the contrary, drug companies make quite a bit of money from selling drugs that treat diseases like diabetes or reduce cholesterol, which can also be controlled or prevented without the use of drugs (more safely, in many cases) through lifestyle changes involving diet and exercise. It's true that there is a market for drugs that target obesity specifically, such as appetite suppressants, but that market has actually [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12742801 declined during the past decade] due in part to the fen-phen disaster. And even at the peak of the craze, the number of Americans taking appetite suppressants was 2.5 million, a fraction of the numer who are taking drugs to treat diseases linked to obesity. Currently, for example, the U.S. has 20.8 million people suffering with diabetes (the sixth most common cause of death in the country), and more than 85 percent of people with diabetes are overweight. (And that's just diabetes. Throw in the drugs sold to treat other obesity-related health problems such as high cholesterol and heart disease, and we're talking about an absolute gold mine for big pharma.)