In the continuing battle of the bulge, and realizing that more families eat out more often than ever before, the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, commissioned a report to discover ways to stop the growing weight gain epidemic. Based on the Keystone Report, the FDA is recommending that restaurants cut back on portions, serve more fruits and vegetables and provide nutritional and caloric information with the meals they serve. You can imagine how well this is going over with the 900,000 restaurants and other food establishments in this country. For a restaurant to implement what the government is suggesting they do, the report itself notes that the laboratory work needed to calculate the calorie content of a menu item can cost $100, or anywhere from $11,500 to $46,000 to analyze an entire menu. That is not taking into account any menu changes. But who exactly is making us fat?
Profitable business is based on supply and demand. The consumers demand certain foods, and if the restaurants hope to have paying customers, serve the type of food in demand. According to the FDA Keystone Report, the top three favorite foods people order when they eat out are burgers, french fries and pizza.
The Keystone Report is 136-pages long and includes many facts about the food we eat when we eat out and the increased calories we are consuming when we do eat out. In the report it states that 64 percent of Americans are overweight, including the 30 percent who are obese, and the weight problem adds up to nearly $93 billion dollars in additional medical costs.
No one doubts we face an overweight/obesity issue in this country, and that more people are overweight than ever before, and that obesity can lead over time to diseases like cancer -- but whose responsibility is it when it comes to eating healthy and making healthy food choices? Honestly, who among us has not been bombarded with educational information about the nutritional value of foods to know which foods are healthy -- and which foods make us fat? The restaurants will serve what we order. Remember, the top three foods we, as consumers, order are -- burgers, french fries and pizza. Most of us already know these are not the best choices in food when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight. Do we need everything we consume while dining out or fast food super-sizing to come with caloric-counting warning labels and do we need to require restaurants to bear the additional costs in telling us something we really already know? It seems redundant. The menu will change when we do.
