The nanny-staters are feeling really good about themselves, now that restaurants will be required to post calorie counts, thanks to the federal health insurance law. The regulation applies to vending machines as well.
As with all regulations, the impacted businesses will incur new costs to comply with the regulations — and guess who will end up paying those? This is why regulations are, in essence, a hidden tax on business and consumers.
The bigger problem, however, is that posting calories has little or no effect on what people consume. Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Airely explains in an interview with Marketplace. (emphasis is mine)
RYSSDAL: All right, so let’s cut to the chase. These calorie labels that we are seeing in some places, and now we’ll see in way more places, do they work?
ARIELY: So far the evidence is no. You put them up, and you would think that they would be very helpful, right? You tell people what the calories are, but all the research done so far, ours and other people, show that this doesn’t work. Basically we got the help of one fast-food Chinese place, we had them holed off for a while, so we could track what people were doing. Then they put calorie labeling, we tracked what people were doing. Turns out the effect is very, very close to zero.
