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."
"There's definitely a subset of people who see and use this information," said researcher Jonathan Cantor of New York University, "but we're not seeing any changes at the population level." Despite this lack of evidence for effectiveness, a similar national rule is set to go into effect in December 2016 as part of ObamaCare.
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