A new study, ‘Evaluating the association between the introduction of mandatory calorie labelling and energy consumed using observational data from the out-of-home food sector in England’ was this week published in Nature Human Behaviour – and reveals that the introduction of mandatory calorie labelling in England appears to have had no impact whatsoever on calorie consumption, despite promises that the policy would reduce over-eating.
Christopher Snowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics at the free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:
“Yet another nanny state policy crashes and burns. The lesson of this study is that people do not eat ‘unhealthy’ food because they are ignorant but because they like it. They don’t need to know exactly how many calories are in a meal and giving them this information makes no difference.
“The government said that mandatory calorie labelling would reduce energy consumption by 41 calories per meal and would produce £5.6 billion of benefits over 25 years. This was never credible and now looks preposterous.
Snowdon continues:
“There is nothing wrong with people being given information, but there is something very wrong with a system in which politicians are repeatedly tricked into introducing ineffective nanny state policies by public health campaigners who are, at best, naive.”