A recent study measuring the impact of the NYC's mandatory requirement to post calorie counts found that calories per transaction in a Starbuck fell by 6%.
Six percent.
As in eating 232 calories compared to 247. Fifteen calories if my math is correct.
Morever, the "impact the effect of calorie posting is actually to increase Starbucks revenue. "
That means either more people showing up or people visting more frequently. Eating more perhaps.
I bring this up in the context of the FDA's war on salt, which comes on the heels of yet another less than rigorous report issued by the Institute of Medicine...
Earlier this week, the Institute of Medicine released a report recommending enforceable sodium standards on the nation's food suppliers as a way to curb heart disease fatalities. The FDA claims to be examining practical means of implementation.
Dr. Michael Alderman, a hypertension specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has been quoted lately in many papers covering the recently vamped-up war on salt. Alderman said a randomized clinical trail is needed to determine the effect of reducing sodium intake on the length and quality of life. At this point, he says, there’s no proof that it couldn’t be detrimental.
“In careful studies of response to sodium reduction, most people have no change in blood pressure, while perhaps a quarter to a third have a significant fall," he said. "And, importantly, something like 10 percent have an equivalent rise in pressure.”
Further, he said, salt reduction can also increase resistance to insulin and other hormones, which can damage cardiovascular health.
“Thus,” he said, “the health effect of reducing sodium will be the net of these
conflicting effects.”
www.pizzamarketplace.com/article.php
Moreover, we don't exactly know what role salt plays in regulating food or calorie intake.
UC Davis nutrition professor Judith Stern and three colleagues last November published a study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology that questions that "scientific logic and feasibility" of limiting sodium consumption.
Stern, along with UC Davis adjunct professor David McCarron, reviewed data from a range of worldwide studies and examined neuroscience research and found that a body naturally regulates salt intake "within a narrowly defined physiological range."
Stern goes on to note: "If a 'normal' range of sodium intake exists that is consistent with the optimal function of established peripheral and central nervous system mechanisms, that fact should be the sole basis of national nutrition guidelines for dietary sodium intake," Stern's study said. "To attempt to use public policy to abrogate human physiology would be futile and possibly harmful to human health."
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/25/2699298/uc-davis-researcher-challenges.html#ixzz0mOtAqxXq
Meanwhile the FDA is also warming up to the task of regulating tobacco products. Ironically, it appears the approach here is more science based and nuanced. The issue of smokeless tobacco (ugh!) as a "safer" substitute for cigarettes is now before the FDA. The question the FDA is grappling with is whether sanctioning a product as less risky will lead to increase consumption and if it does, lead to a switch and/or a reduction in cancer or nicotine dependence.
The issue is presently clearly by Carl Bialik, "The Numbers Guy" at The WSJ:
Much of the available data on smokeless tobacco comes from Sweden. There, men gradually have cut down on smoking and increased their use of snus, a form of moist snuff that doesn't require spitting, in a shift that began in the 1970s. Lung-cancer deaths among Swedish men peaked in 1978; since then, the death rate has declined to the lowest in the European Union.
This is the major basis for claims that smokeless tobacco can have a massive public-health benefit. But even believers acknowledge they are making some assumptions beyond what can be proven.
"I would be just as interested as you in any study that directly shows that snus use is a cause of decline in smoking rates," says Lars Ramström, director of the Institute for Tobacco Studies in Stockholm."But I do not have a real hope of ever finding such a study."
The experience of another effort to induce American smokers to switch clouds the picture for Terry Pechacek, associate director for science in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's office on smoking and health. He recalls that many smokers switched to low-tar cigarettes beginning in the 1960s, under the mistaken belief they were safer. "We need to be careful not to repeat this experience," says Dr. Pechacek. Public-health officials, he adds, are reluctant to advocate any form of tobacco use. "We do not need to make the American public guinea pigs."
That prescription should apply to any effort to manage health habits through regulation. We might have people doing what government tells them but winding up sicker than ever.
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703876404575200660292856340.html
