Menu Labeling News Today

Study analyzes nine years of data from Taco Bell restaurants, showing that nutritional menu labeling led to a 22-25% reduction in calories-per-transaction, supporting the effectiveness of the United States Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 in promoting healthier dietary choices.

The Food and Drug Administration is encouraging restaurants to voluntarily include added sugars as part of the nutritional information listed on menus.

The FDA appears to be advancing a new public health paradigm, trying to influence and even limit what people can eat.

Government should respect the voluntary choices made by individuals when it comes to their diets.

Applies to everyday americans watching this interview? >> the fda issued menu labeling regulations several years ago that were disastrous. well beyond -- they were a big overreach from the most expensive regulations that had ever been proposed by an agency. what im asking for a common sense as it applies to these regulations. flexibility so that food establishments are not subjected to civil penalties or other fines for menu labeling requirements put on by the fda. >> bill: you think the governm...

Dollars in increased taxes, we also saw many regulations, one of the most burdensome were regulation that is were way beyond that were ever intended. label requirements, now on deli, grocery delis, any food establishment in the country. i am leaving an effort to bring common sense menu labeling, we are not getting into the debate as to whether the calorie counts are going to be required but do it in a common sense way. for example, you look at a pizza shop that is 34 million combinations of pizz...

There. the thing thats more onerous about this regulation is its pretty expensive. theyre talking about $24 million as you said in the first year alone and the problem here is that a lot of vending machine operators are small business owners. 3/4 of them have fewer than three employees that operate these businesses. its not a terribly onerous regulation, right? everyone likes the idea of having information, but at the same time were talking about reducing obesity rates or calories by a couple of...

Improve quality, change the work force, its got menu labeling so that we reduce the obesity rate in this country. its doing many, many more things than medicare ever did. i would say outside of the exchange, not everything is working perfectly but were certainly seeing changes in the health system in a positive direction. a lot of focus on reducing hospital infections. a lot of focus on reducing re-admission rates, a lot of effort to control costs. we recently did a poll with the biggest hospita...

That are overweight, end up being obese, and that leads to type ii diabetes, a disease they never diagnosed in children before, and that leads to problems the doctors were talking about later on. >> and we dont have a system to take care of the problem. therein lies the problem. >> zeke, youre trying to define the presidents health care plan and help people understand it. how is this new news going to affect the way insurance companies have to respond, and can you already hear the complaints the...

Adjudicate the legal angle here, the moral angle, but it is kind of strange that you can go to 7-eleven, a big corporation, and buy a 28,000-ounce drink, and then you cant go next door to the same bodega and buy the same thing, because 7-lefb has larger power and has lobbied for the same thing in the past. so in that sense, jeff is right, theres a tangle of weird regulations and loopholes. but it is a weird, slipperly slope. mayor bloomberg has also talked about banning large-sized popcorn in mo...