Honestly, this is long overdue.
Restaurant groups, nutrition and disease-prevention advocates and Washington lawmakers from both sides of the partisan divide on Wednesday announced they have hammered out an agreement that will put calorie contents on the menus of chain restaurants and other nutritional information within easy reach of consumers.
Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)*, Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Wednesday that a draft compromise would oblige any establishment that is part of a chain of 20 or more restaurants operating under the same name to post the calorie content of all of its regular offerings and, upon request, to provide written information about menu items’ fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sodium, sugars, dietary fiber and protein.
The draft language is to be included in an omnibus health reform bill under assembly on Capitol Hill. It would create a single national standard for nutritional disclosure by chain restaurants and eateries, preempting provisions adopted by some localities that have been stricter.
It would be better if the stricter local provisions could be left in place, but I can live with this. Honestly, I don’t even know what the argument against this is. People can’t make fully-informed choices without full information. Here are a few examples of what we’d learn if this information were readily available today. Maybe you felt better not knowing, but I daresay there won’t be such egregious choices out there once this is out there. Doonesbury was on this all last week.