So, are mandated calorie counts on foods, (evil) government intervention in the free market or a useful boost to creating an efficient market by trying to help create that essential prerequisite, the informed consumer?
Or both, I guess, since free market (buyer+seller do what they want) is perhaps only tangentially related to perfect/efficient market (actors all rational, perfect information).
Are their any parallels in the tech world (perhaps minimum specs/compatability or age/content labelling on some software, i.e. games)?
Would it be useful if there was more pre-purchase consumer-level information on software or tech products?
I don't see why this type of government intervention should worry anyone. It's about information transparency. Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market? There are also shelf tags, in supermarkets, dictating price per quantity. How do any of those measures hurt the free market? If anything, it forces food vendors to better evaluate their products in contrast to their competition. And that seems to be exactly what's happening. A little bit of transparency goes a long way. Seems to me, that's a perfect role for government.
The government argument for me isn't all or none. It's: How much?
"I don't see why this type of government intervention should worry anyone."
Regulation disproportionately burdens small players. If other drafts of restaurant legislation don't exempt small players, my favorite restaurants (and my friends that run them) get a big headache.
Regulation seems to swell unless it is violently opposed. I've been locked out of exciting things by it personally (international trade), and seen it killing the things I love (eccentric houses, innovation, hiking trails) in my few short years of adulthood.
I like this regulation. But I'm going to holler mightily if it tries to get any bigger.
I think restaurants with 15 or more outlets stopped being the little guy a while ago. There is a lot of poorly done regulation that hinders the little guy but that's more an execution detail than a basic fault of regulation.
I feel that critiques of regulation focusing on quantity instead of quality miss the mark. Regulation to protect and empower consumers usually differs substantially from regulation designed to create barrers to entry. Regulation protecting the environment and other third parties can have barrier-type consequences, especially if its creation is influenced by corporate lobbyists, but it's certainly possible to do well.
What we need is intelligently designed regulation; more "source lines of legislation" isn't necessarily worse, if it covers edge cases well.
The real problem, of course, is the incentive structure for the people who vote on the legislation. It needs fixing, probably by some large, concerted effort of very smart people and a national referendum.
> Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market?
Well, there are two factors:
1) If the government mandates that a certain value is indicated on the label, it also vouches to a certain extent that the "better" value (lower for calories) is actually "better". So calories is OK, but it's a slope. How about an Atkins-adherence(or whatever)-index? The problem is that once such a measure is implemented, it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of it, even if it turns out to be bogus or even misleading, because the politician supporting it will be accused of being anti-consumer (why would s/he be against more information?), or just in the pocket of Big Food.
2: It may not be very cost effective to calculate the appropriate value. Consider a restaurant, where the chef that goes to the farmers market every day and gets whats really fresh and in season. The chef now has to commit time, everyday, calculating the calorie-count for each dish. More bookkeeping, less cooking. It may be easy to do for calories (I'm not sure, I'm neither a chef nor a dietist), but what if it requires samples to be sent to a lab somewhere?
I am against mandatory calorie counts on menus for restaurants. I don't think it passes the benefits-costs test. And, it gives me the impression that I live in a society where everything I do is being watched and regulated. Sometimes I just want to buy a bowl of chow from another human being without justifying my action to some self-righteous bureaucrat.
> Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market?
Well, it's fairly close to an issue which has been controversial: whether to require the labelling of GM milk.
Personally, I'm happy for there to be a goodly amount of regulation about consumables. I don't think a raw free market (if you sell food which makes people sick, your brand will suffer) provides enough protection in that case.
I was really trying to think about the benefits+costs of forcing sellers to give more information to consumers, and how that might translate to other products.
(Warning:
- this program is written in C - it may suffer from buffer overruns.
- this program is written in .NET/java - it may require a huge download in order to run
- etc)
Slightly more seriously, how about a govt regulation which required showing typical working set size of your program in operation in Mbytes?
How about being required to notify users that your software patches system-level functionality? (no more DRM "rootkits" )?
If I could create backup copies of myself and/or run copies of myself in a VM I wouldn't really care about labels on food, medicine or even FDA approvals.
Take this with a grain of salt, since I am not an economist. However, I think that Government intervention isn't evil.
For the free market economy to work, a number of assumptions are made in the model. For example, we assume that consumers are well informed, and make judgements on the product's attributes. We also assume that there are no significant externalities, and all costs are actually exposed to the companies.
Labelling the foods with their actual properties, testing them for safety, and other similar government intervention can actually bring things closer to the ideal free market economy where the consumers know what they're buying, and the costs of environmental cleanup are passed on to the companies causing the damage.
I consider myself a libertarian on most issues, but more of an agnostic on how well the free market works, and what the role of government should be there. Issues like this are really tough for me to decide.
"Are mandated calorie counts on foods, (evil) government intervention in the free market or a useful boost to creating an efficient market by trying to help create that essential prerequisite"
Could you elaborate? Is it because I'm being dualistic in my apparent mindset? Surely that's more occidental? (Actually it was on purpose, but never mind).
I meant because you are imagining this platonic ideal of the free market and then going out and trying to compare how real world systems sync with that ideal.
In any event the justification behind the free market being the best economic system is that it is the most efficient way to allocate goods and services to the people who want them the most. So asking whether or not this reform interferes with the free market doesn't make much sense in this case.
Maybe it's just me, but I really think people should focus more on just eating more naturally and walking instead of driving or taking the train.
When I say natural food, I mean that you should avoid things like:
- Cow Milk and diary products. It's for cows, not for humans
- Fruit Juices/Soda and other sources of unnatural sugar
- Oil
Stick with naturally human stuff like
- Meat
- Leaves and stuff made of leaves
- Fruits (not fruit juice)
- Nuts
I think one should just think before eating : if I were a caveman, how easy would it be to make this thing? And if it would be pretty hard, then treat it like a luxury, and eat sparingly. For example, chocolate.
This is one of the stupider points I keep seeing. At least some human populations have been eating dairy products for over ten thousand years. That's a serious chunk of human evolution. Only certain people should avoid diary, but more commonly they'd be fine with fermented products and should just avoid straight milk.
> Oil
Again, thousands of years of healthy people eating lots of olive and coconut oil.
For most of my life I wasn't Lactose-intolerant... In the past year or so I've somehow managed to convince my body to start mutating the shape of those oh-so-wonderful lactase enzymes.
Now, I don't _have_ to drink lactase-added milk, but it certainly helps those who are around me.
I can still do cheese and yoghurt, but its only straight-up milk that irks my stomach.
"Good" oils are very good for people. "Good" oils raise HDL levels in people. They lubricate blood vessels and do amazing things for your body. Generally, the only things you need to stay away from are hydrogenated things and things that don't occur in nature.
+Fish oil
-Partially Hydrogenated (insert plant name here) oil
+fat (I never understood why people were so obsessed with fat-free stuff. Fat is good for you. It's satisfying, yet has a delayed glycemic index response.)
What are your dietary credentials? Every time there's a remotely food related post, you come in banging the "NO STARCH MOAR FATS" tambourine, and I'm curious where your data comes from.
I don't have any tangible credentials (read: I'm not a doctor), but my data comes from being mildly obsessed about nutrition (heredity isn't on my side) and from reading as much as I possibly can about nutrition (American Society for Nutrition, the National Agricultural Library, etc). Plus, it helps that I'm an engineer, I tackle most problems by amassing as much data as I can before actually doing what I should be doing.
Carbohydrates are important... they just shouldn't be overdone. Especially the refined ones. Milk = good, fruits = good, whole grain bread = decent, Wonderbread = crap.
I count calories in the opposite direction. I usually buy the things that are more calorie dense. Like I usually buy clif bar and related clif products because they pack a lot of calories per bite with a relatively good effect on my blood sugar.
I've started eating extra pb&j's at school/work to make it through the day. I struggle to eat enough good food because of my demanding days and low student income. It can be difficult to pack 500+ calories of snacks to make it through a long afternoon. Do other people have this problem?
Check this talk about obesity and nutrition. Perhaps calories are not all the same, depending on the source and how each different body metabolizes it.
You can also research related subjects like glycemic index (or glycemic load), metabolic syndrome, paleolithic diet, protein diets.
I have been avoiding concentrated carbs (bread, rice, potatoes, grains) for 2 months, with the occasional exception of dark chocolate bars, and I shed 10 pounds quickly. My weight stabilized already, I am lean, and my blood chemistry is fine. I have a friend that has been the same for about the same time with similar results. My girlfriend also has shed some pounds although she is not that strict.
I have craved bread a couple of times. I avoided eating it and the craving went away after eating.
A warning. Changing my life style this way has been a challenging at times. Sometimes it is difficult to get enough of the stuff I eat in a regular serving at public places. My meals are generally more expensive (health is expensive), but I also eat nicer food.
Glad someone pointed to Taubes. What saddens me about the (reported) response to calorie transparency's backlash is uniform fat reduction, instead of menu options for different kinds of metabolism. My weight, for instance, happily drops with insulin control. Without carbohydrates, I simply can't gain pounds.
I don't think people should count calories. Your sense of hunger and satiety accurately tells you how many calories you need if you're eating properly. If you eat a 1,900 calorie lunch you're just not going to be hungry in the evening and things will net out.
The main reason hunger as a guide breaks down and people feel the need to count calories is a poor diet, usually heavy with starch and light on saturated fats. You also see a lot of people religiously following a meal schedule. If you're not hungry, don't eat! Skip meals occasionally. People just don't listen to their bodies.
I'm afraid that information transparency tends to be a lot more effective than admonitions.
Also, it's considerably less hassle to me if I can check the calories upfront and order a meal I can eat in full, rather than make a series of evaluations, calculating the marginal dis/utility of an extra bite (is my hunger satiated? if so, do I stop eating because my hunger is satiated or continue because the food still tastes great?). There's also a longstanding norm against leaving food on your plate which can make people feel uncomfortable about not finishing.
The emphasis calorie counts put on ordering a meal which you can feel comfortable about eating in its entirety are also encouraging restaurants to switch to smaller plates, which helps change our perception of what a "normal sized meal" is. And it's less wasteful.
Someone who's fifty pounds overweight still has strong biochemical urges to eat though they may not need to. Aren't they listening to their bodies?
More problematic is the evidence that suggests that eating changes the brain. Sure, some of that is cultural. But most of that is physical including emotional needs.
They have the urge to eat to excess because: their endocrine system is all wacked up from too much starch and from a lack of fasting periods (they eat too frequently; the body is meant to go the odd 12 hour stretch without food), mineral and vitamin malnutrition create hunger, and sedentism. If you fix the diet appetite will usually work fine.
A pure calorie counting approach is surely doomed to failure, anyway. Hunger is far too powerful a motivator. You have to fix the appetite first.
I just started the Hacker's Diet 3 weeks ago (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/), which is basically calorie counting. Although I'll obviously hold final judgment until I am able to reach my goal weight and hold it for a long period of time (considering how overweight I am, this will probably take around a year), I'm pretty convinced already that it will work.
I'm convinced not because of the measly five pounds I've lost so far (I know all too well how easy that can come back), but because of the change in my habits that I've noticed. I used to eat until full. Now that I'm calorie counting (and actually maintaining a pretty large calorie deficit), I finish eating what I planned to and feel a strong urge to eat more, but five minutes after stopping I realize I'm actually not hungry. I haven't had strong hunger in between meals since day 3 or 4 of the diet.
I should also note that I'm eating basically from the same two food groups I was before, namely processed/junk food and lots of carbs. I know that's it's own problem, but for me the idea of giving up baguettes is way more unthinkable and would require way more will power than simply eating less.
I recognize not everyone who is overweight is so for the same reasons I am. But for me, clearly portion control was an issue. Hopefully this can take me all the way to my goal weight, because honestly this has been a really painless process. If not, and I stall somewhere above it, I'll consider increasing my workout regimen and/or changing what I eat.
Right, I agree. I was just disagreeing with the "listen to your body". That won't work if your body is out of whack and has been for years.
I'm a big believer in my nutritionist. But calorie information is very helpful and it seems profitable. I don't see anyone advocating a "pure" calorie counting approach at the expense of what you're eating.
Some of our ancestors had a meat-and-potatoes type diet and some of us still eat the same. However, a lot of our ancestors worked in the fields and did physical labor (to burn off those calories)
