Calories on packaging and in menus useful? No, says research, it makes people insecure

In America, since 2018, it has been mandatory for chains with more than 20 restaurants to list all calories on their menus. Photo: Unsplash

Do you find calorie counts on packaging and menus unappealing? You’re not alone. New research shows that calorie counts don’t help consumers better judge which foods are healthy.

It actually makes them more insecure.

The study, published in the Journal of Retailing , shows that people who include calorie information in their judgments, rate healthy food as less healthy and unhealthy food as less unhealthy. The result? Their judgments become more moderate and they doubt their own judgments more. Calorie information does not lead to better choices , but rather causes confusion.

In the study, participants were shown different foods, such as a salad or a cheeseburger, and then had to estimate how healthy they found them. Without calorie information, they saw a clear difference between healthy and unhealthy. But once calories were shown, that difference faded.

In another experiment, it was found that estimating the number of calories in a product undermined confidence in one's own judgment. It was precisely this uncertainty that caused people to tone down their judgments.

Interestingly, this effect occurred mainly with calories and not with other nutritional information such as fat or carbohydrates. According to the researchers, this is because calories seem familiar to many people, while in reality they are less well understood. Deidre Popovich calls this the illusion of calorie fluency in The Conversation : people think they can interpret calories well , but are more likely to get confused when they have to actively think about them.

The findings shed new light on the effectiveness of public health measures, such as mandatory calorie listing in restaurants or on packaging. In the Netherlands, it is currently only mandatory to list calories on packaging. This is not required on menus. There are a few catering establishments that already do this, such as Joe and the Juice , but a large proportion of catering entrepreneurs do not (yet) like the idea. A survey by the Royal Dutch Hospitality Association previously showed that even 67 percent of entrepreneurs did not think it was a good idea.

In America, since 2018, it has been mandatory for chains with more than twenty restaurants to put all calories on their menus. In restaurants, you can hardly avoid knowing the calories of your ordered dish.

Policymakers assume that transparency leads to healthier choices. For example, a measure to add calorie information to the menus of large catering establishments could prevent around 730 deaths by 2041, according to a study by the University of Liverpool . But this study shows that this is far from always the case. In some cases, calorie information can therefore be counterproductive.

This does not mean that this information should be removed. However, it is important that it is supported by context, so that it can be better interpreted. Examples of this are the use of colour codes such as the traffic light system, or the addition of reference values: what percentage of the daily recommended amount of calories a product contains.