Food label laws that require calorie counts might not be changing consumer behavior

See Two Burritos for Breakfast: I don't need mandatory food labels to tell me McDonald's isn't health food. And neither do you by Veronique de Rugy, in Reason magazine. Excerpts:

"But it turns out that in the fight against obesity, labeling menus hasn't delivered on its promise. Despite the clamor for more information, Panera quickly discovered that its disclosure efforts were failing to change customers' dietary choices.

This is consistent with the findings of numerous peer-reviewed studies. In the February 2011 American Journal for Preventive Medicine, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School researchers Eric A. Finkelstein, Kiersten L. Strombotne, Nadine L. Chan, and James Krieger wrote that a mandatory menu-labeling regulation imposed on Washington state's King County restaurants did not affect consumers' calorie consumption at all. The authors "were surprised that we could not detect even the slightest hint of changes in purchasing behavior as a result of the legislation," they wrote. And their study is not alone.

Such findings are at odds with a report by the White House Task Force on Obesity, which claimed that "when presented with calorie information (how many calories are contained in each menu item) and a calorie recommendation (how many calories men and women of varying activity levels should consume), people on average order meals with significantly fewer calories." First lady and benevolent food tyrant Michelle Obama likes to cite that data point when pressing for greater restaurant regulation.

But as Julie Gunlock explained at National Review Online in 2011, that claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny. "This study was conducted in one Subway sandwich shop on only 292 participants, the vast majority of whom were adult white males, 25 percent of whom admitted they were currently dieting," she wrote. "This isn't exactly research upon which major policy decisions should be based." And yet, in this administration, it was.

There are many other arguments against food-labeling regulations of the sort the FDA is now imposing on businesses around the country. For one, the science behind what causes obesity is far from settled. All this focus on calorie counts, for instance, may be misguided, since recent food science suggests that all calories are not created equal."

"A March 2012 paper by the economists Sherzod Abdukadirov of the Mercatus Center and Michael L. Marlow of California Polytechnic State University looked at anti-obesity efforts in the United States in the 20th century. The authors found that government policies have been ineffective mostly because they are designed to remedy a market failure, while in reality, obesity is a problem that many people, not least the obese themselves, have a strong incentive to address even in the absence of official intervention."