In 2008, New York City began requiring any restaurant with 15 or more locations to list calorie counts for their products. The plan, in theory, was that customers would make more moderate choices if they had the information required to do so.
In practice, the mandate doesn't work — at all. A new study published in Health Affairs found that while fast food customers claim to notice and use calorie count data, there was "no consistent change in the nutritional content of foods and beverages purchased or in how often respondents purchased fast food."
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