Labels

Data glut. Information overload. Knowing more and more about less and less.

Isn’t this how it feels when you look at the encyclopedic information on the back of a food label?

It’s not helpful … but we have to do something. Our problem with Overweight and Obesity threatens to overtake tobacco as our #1 preventable cause of death.

But, what to do? Apparently, if you are a congressman, you make laws to put more in more and more information to micromanage the molecules of our foods. Here’s the Reuters report.

Laws requiring that calories and other nutritional information be posted in fast food restaurants and on menus have become increasingly popular. And, lawmakers in Washington are struggling to get the practice adopted nationwide.

In fact, last September, California became the first U.S. state to require fast-food restaurant chains to list calories on their menus. New York City followed, and more than a dozen states are considering similar health code provisions.

What’s the Deal?
Labeling everything, and giving us more and more information is not an awful thing in itself. But after a while, the overload makes it hard to process any of it. At all.

It may be best to use the simple solution, and leave the molecular parsing to the grad students who are happy to do all that number crunching for nothing more than pizza and a beer.

Expect to see labeling on all your menus, but remember the basic principles. Eat food. Learn to love your food again. When you do this, the background noise of molecular micromanagement become, truly, an academic issue.