When fast-food restaurant menus list nutritional information, parents of young children are more likely to choose lower-calorie choices, a new study finds.
But interestingly, parents don't restrict their own calorie intake, the researchers also found.
For the study, published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers went to a pediatric clinic in Seattle and asked 99 parents of three- to six-year-olds to take part. The volunteers were randomly broken into two groups that were both shown McDonald's menus.
One group’s menus included pictures and prices of the food choices; the other included pictures, prices and the calorie content of each item. The parents were then asked to choose foods for both themselves and their kids.
On average, parents whose menus did not list calories chose a meal with about 671 calories; those who did have the information chose a meal of 567 calories.
Dr. Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Research Institute, who led the study, says while 100 calories may seem like a small amount, over time, those extra calories can add up and lead to weight gain.
The study also found that parents did not change their own energy intake significantly when offered the calorie information.
Tandon concedes that the study was conducted in a controlled setting and it’s not clear whether in the “real world,” frazzled and time-pressed parents might make different choices. But she said the results suggest calorie counts on menus do affect parents.
"This is encouraging, and suggests that parents do want to make wise food decisions for their children, but they need help. Now that some areas are requiring nutritional information in chain restaurants, we have opportunities to further study what happens when we put this knowledge in the hands of parents," she said in a news release.
Only a handful of restaurants offer calorie counts directly on their menus, although most provide information on their corporate websites or, sometimes, in brochures that customers can request.
Many health advocates have called for the inclusion of calorie information on menus, including the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada this week in its Annual Report on Canadians' Health.
California, Oregon, and New York City have passed policies requiring chain restaurant to provide calorie information, though it remains unclear how effective the measures have been.
In October, an independent study of New York's law concluded that menu labelling had done nothing to change consumer habits in the city's low-income neighborhoods. But then shortly after, the city's health department released preliminary data from a larger study suggesting that New Yorkers had, in fact, started buying fewer calories at nine of 13 fast-food and coffee chains included in the research.
