South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
For healthy eating, research suggests ordering new items on restaurant menus
Are you attempting to eat healthier? Try ordering a recently added menu item at your favorite chain restaurant, instead of a long-time favorite. Newer dishes served by large restaurant chains tend to contain fewer calories now that menus must list the calorie content of all items.
New research finds that menu items introduced after calorie labeling went into effect in 2018 contained about 25% fewer calories on average compared to dishes introduced before labeling.
“The nationwide rollout of these calorie labels appeared to prompt restaurants to introduce lower-calorie items to their menus,” said lead scientist Anna Grummon, a research fellow in nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
A provision of the U.S. Affordable Care Act requires that restaurant chains with 20 or more U.S. locations must post the calorie content of prepared foods on menus.
Prior research has found that people eating out have cut their calories slightly — 4% to 6% on average — in response to the new labeling, according to the paper.
But it hasn’t been clear how the industry responded to the requirement, in terms of shaking up their menus and offering lower-calorie options.
For this study, Grummon and her colleagues analyzed the calories of more than 35,300 menu items sold at 59 large chain restaurants — including Chipotle, Burger King, IHOP, Dunkin Donuts and KFC — in the U.S. between 2012 and 2019.
The researchers found that restaurants didn’t change their formula for existing items in the face of calorie labeling. Dishes on the menu beforehand had the same calorie content going forward, according to the study recently published in JAMA Network Open. But new dishes offered after labeling went into effect tended to contain an average 113 fewer calories, or about 25% less, than the calories of foods introduced before the requirement, the researchers reported.
“That suggests the labeling law is potentially leading to consumers having more lower-calorie options,” Grummon said.