Restaurants to Post Calories

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/nyregion/23menu.html

January 23, 2008
City Tries Again to Require Restaurants to Post Calories
By DIANE CARDWELL

New Yorkers wondering just how many calories they are consuming in each grande-size white hot chocolate at Starbucks (490) or Double Whopper with cheese at Burger King (990) could soon see those numbers printed alongside the price, according to revised regulations approved on Tuesday by the city’s Board of Health.

Under the rules, which officials rewrote after a federal judge struck down similar provisions in September, any chain that operates at least 15 outlets nationwide would have to display calorie content on their menu boards, menus or food tags — essentially wherever the restaurant lists the information that customers use to make their choices.

“Most people underestimate calorie content by a lot,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, adding that he considered the rules a potent weapon in the crusade against rising obesity rates. “Even dietitians get a lot of it wrong.”

Dr. Frieden said his department’s research showed that consumers often make faulty assumptions about the calorie counts of items on a menu. But when they have the information, he said, they tend to choose food with fewer calories.

As a result of the regulations, set to go into effect on March 31, Dr. Frieden predicted that some restaurants will eliminate some of their offerings, like appetizers that top 2,000 calories.

Chuck Hunt, a spokesman for the New York State Restaurant Association, which successfully challenged the earlier rules in Federal District Court in Manhattan, said his group was considering suing over the revised regulations.

“It’s cumbersome, and it really isn’t going to work,” he said, adding that many operators of fast-food restaurants were franchisees who would not be able to easily afford to comply with the rules. He said that federal regulations designed to reduce obesity by listing calorie content on food in supermarkets had not kept the epidemic at bay.

In December 2006, the Board of Health approved the first set of menu-labeling requirements for chain restaurants, making New York the first city to do so.

The city, seeking to make the requirement less burdensome on restaurant owners, had limited it to those that had already disclosed calorie counts in some way. Some chains, including Wendy’s, White Castle and Quiznos, stopped providing the information at their restaurants in the city while they weighed how or if to comply.

Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy’s, said that although the chain was in favor of providing the information, the new Board of Health regulations would be difficult to put in place because there were so many variations in their meals. It is almost impossible, he said, to accurately represent calories with a single number.

“For us, the idea makes sense,” Mr. Lynch said. “But now take the idea and put it into practice at the restaurant and it is complicated, very difficult to do.”

Wendy’s, he said, places a poster with the complete nutritional content of the various components of their meals as close to the cash register as possible. He said that was a better solution.

Representatives of White Castle and Quiznos did not return telephone messages seeking comment.

In the lawsuit filed by the Restaurant Association, Judge Richard J. Holwell ruled that the original regulation was pre-empted by the federal Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 because of the way the city had limited the chains to which it applied. In his decision, he provided a framework for the city to redraft its rules, which health officials say they closely followed.

The new rules will apply to about 10 percent of the city’s 23,000 restaurants, about the same number as would have been affected by the earlier version. The restaurants that will fall under the new regulation serve about one-third of the food eaten away from home each year, according to health officials.

“The real question for us is, is the industry going to become part of the solution or are they going to keep going to court to hide from the customers what they’re serving them?” Dr. Frieden said. “If your business model depends on keeping information from your consumers, that’s a problem.”