Calorie Disclosures May Hit Menus Nationwide

June 11, 2009— -- America is a country obsessed with numbers. How much money do you make? How much did you pay for your home? How much do you weigh? But, now, everyone may be forced to consider some numbers that are a whole lot harder to swallow: the calories in our food.

Newly proposed federal legislation may require chain restaurants with 20 or more establishments to post the calories of everything they serve, right on the menu. And the National Restaurant Association, which originally fought calorie posting, now says it supports it.

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Calorie counting is already on display in New York City. Enacted last year, the law was the idea of the local health department after officials there started looking at some other numbers.

"In some of our neighborhoods, two out of three residents are overweight or obese and that has doubled over the last decade," said Dr. Lynn Silver, assistant commissioner for chronic disease prevention and control at the city's Department of Health. "This is a problem that is getting worse.

"We hope that this law will have a significant impact on both the frequency of obesity and diabetes in our city. We estimate that in our city there will be 150,000 fewer people obese because of this."

But whether the law will make a difference in the waistline of New Yorkers is still the subject of debate.

"I'm a purist," said Josh Ozersky, the national restaurant editor for Citysearch.com and author of "The Hamburger: a History."

"I love it when it's incredibly complex and layered, when all the arts of gastronomy have gone into a dish," he said last year at one of his favorite spots in New York, Hill Country Barbecue. "But it should all be based on the beauty and simplicity of animal fat."

Ozersky doubts that knowing how many calories are found in a particular dish is going to stop people from ordering their favorites.

"I don't think calorie counts are going to stop people from ordering something that's really good," he said.