by David B Hitchcock

Created on: May 09, 2009

Should restaurants be required to list calories and fat grams on their menus?

You are hard working and follow your diet to the letter. Things are going well and you're on track to meet your goal. But when you go to a restaurant, what do you order? More often than not you end up eating plain veggies or lettuce just to be safe. Right?

Well, that's one group of people. That's the group that wants all the nutritional info on restaurant menus. And they have a point - all of us can make healthier choices for what we eat with that information. But most people don't want to think about calories, grams of fat, and grams of sugar when they go out to eat.

Most people go out to eat to relax and forget the day to day pressures and stresses. When you don't have to cook and serve and clean up, that's a good start for relaxing. But with all that extra information on the menu, people won't be able to relax the same. If that information is available but not on the menu, it's a better solution for everyone.

Many restaurants have information available on request, but not on the menu. That is a very good solution because anyone who wants to read can read it, but if you don't care it's not thrust in your face.

All restaurants should have the ingredients in their foods listed, separately instead of on the menu, for allergy issues and including calories and other nutritional information is a good idea as well. If a restaurant doesn't have that information available and you have an allergy, it is your choice to somewhere else that does have that information and you can be certain you are safe in eating your chosen meal.

Let's look at it from the restaurant point of view. The more information on the menu, the harder it is for people to make a decision or order what the restaurant wants them to. Not to mention the menu has to be bigger and bigger to have room for all this information, and that means that some items on the menu will get overlooked simply because they get... lost. Some menus have next to no information on them right now - no prices, no ingredients, and so on. These elite restaurants would have their clean simple menus spoiled if they were forced to add more information. And the people going to these restaurants would have their enjoyable night out brought down a notch when faced with information they don't really care about simply because a silly new law said it had to be there.

Yes, restaurants should have allergy and untraditional information on hand to provide to customers who inquire about it, but that information should not be on the menu directly unless the restaurant wants to put it there.

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