New York Restaurants Must Provide Nutritional Labels on Menu Items

According to Slashfood, 10 percent of restaurants in NYC must now provide nutritional labels for the food that they provide on their menus, making the calories of the foods as eye-appealing as the prices.

Many people look at a nutritional label on the back of a food that they are eating and are completely clueless. Many people do not even bother to look anymore and just eat whatever is appealing to them. And then there are even the people who over eat, thinking "wow, this whole box only has 250 calories," wow in reality it is really only a serving of 10 little pieces, though they have already eaten to whole box.

While many people are still uneducated about the nutrition facts on the back of everything these days due to laws concerning foods, there are the healthy freaks that want to know just about everything they are eating. Some use this to help their diet, some will not eat products with over a certain number on ingredients, and for people that have diseases such as celiac disease, this simple nutritional label helps the identify if the products contain "gluten," an ingredient that people with celiac disease can not eat. So, for some the nutritional label is very helpful.

So, what is all the talk about this label for? A new law this month is forcing about ten percent of the restaurants in New York City to provide these labels to everything to their menus for their customers. These facts, including the number of calories in the meal, such be as revealing to the customer as the price of the dinner is. But what is the purpose? The purpose is to allow buyers to realize how fattening and bad their favorite foods are in effort to make them decide to start eating a more healthy alternative. When people read these nutritional labels and realize they are eating half of their daily levels in a slushy, dessert, hamburger, or other fatty food, most will think twice and buy something just as good that is better for them.

Lawmakers want restaurant patrons to be able to see the contents of their foods better, saying that the on line nutritional guides are not enough, wanting the new required in store labels in order for it to make the customers harder to ignore the true facts about what they are actually eating. Some items that people may begin to think twice about are the Big Mac, which has 540 calories, or the Mocha Frappuccino, which has 500 calories.

So only 10 percent of restaurants in NYC will present these new labels in stores. But this will indeed be a growing trend. Eventually, it would not be a surprise if all restaurants everywhere would need nutritional labels for everything on their menus, just like if u go into a grocery store and everything is labeled. So, Is this the time in age for a newer, healthier America?

Sources:
Slashfood. "NYC wants restaurants to list calories"
http://www.slashfood.com/2006/10/31/nyc-wants-restaurants-to-list-calories/