According to the Wall Street Journal food retailers will soon begin posting calorie counts. (This is via Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook).
According to the article:
“Health advocates say the change could be a powerful tool in fighting the obesity epidemic, a top initiative in Washington since first lady Michelle Obama made childhood obesity her signature cause in February.
"Everybody's going to be a little bit better informed, and that's a good thing," said Lou Sheetz, executive vice president at Sheetz Inc., an Altoona, Pa., convenience store chain with 380 outlets in six states.”
The notion is nice, but misguided. As I have written elsewhere, facts are not incentives. Raw bits of data don’t mean a lot. To have power, facts need context that gives them meaning. For example, researchers across a number of fields point out that to act I need to know what my peers are doing with the data; if you want me to lose weight put me around others who are losing weight and I’ll try to keep down with the Joneses.
At my desk I’m surrounded by bits of data. According to my water bill, which is on top of my “to be filed” pile, my “current read” is 788, my “Usage (CCF)” is 8 and my “Usage (gallons)” is 5,984. I have no idea what the first two phrases mean and I have no idea if 6,000 gallons is a lot or a little. Calorie counts will become CCFs – numbers without context or meaning. I try to eat relatively healthily and I try to exercise, but haven’t the slightest idea how many calories I consume in a day and how that number compares to other men in their mid-40s who are six feet tall.
But, I hear my liberal foodie friends cry, there is no disadvantage to more information. Again, I would disagree. First, more data become more bits of white noise that we simply stop seeing thus arguably making it more difficult to make informed choices with meaningful data. Second, it is one more thing that small businesses must do – there is a cost to those who serve us the cheddar fries and chocolate covered bacon (both of which I love). That cost comes out of very slender profit margins, which means other cuts elsewhere in the company or it means increased prices for us. Just because it might not hurt to have a data point is not a reason to mandate action.
Clearly Americans need to make better choices about their health, which includes food. But rather than toss out data (11!) and hope for the best, smart advocates will learn why people make the choices they do, how those choices are affected, and work with those lessons.
