Calories you can believe in

On first glance it seems like a neat way of giving consumers helpful information on the calorific consequences of their meal choices. By the end of April, 18 national food chains, including Burger King, Prêt A Manger, Pizza Hut , Subway, Sainsbury and Tesco cafes, Wimpey, Marks & Spencer cafes, KFC, Harvester pubs and a number of workplace canteens will print on menus and/or menu-boards the calories contained in many of their most popular dishes.

It is all part of a drive by the Food Standards Agency to nudge restaurant chains into giving stronger and more accurate information to consumers about the calories they are about to digest. And given the huge external costs of obesity which become more apparent with every new piece of research, overcoming some of the information failures in the market place seems intuitively the right thing to do. If they didn’t already have inkling about it, fans of a double whopper with cheese at Burger King will find out that it contains 960 calories – nearly half the recommended daily amount for a woman, while a standard hamburger contains 266.

Naturally a number of business groups have stepped forward to criticize the initiative - step forward the British Hospitality Association which claims that the costs of calculating and then putting calorific information on menus will hit smaller restaurants and cafes disproportionately. For many people heading for a meal out, the last thing they want thrust in front of them is a menu littered with warning signs about the dangers to one’s waist line from plumping for the salad with extra mayo.

Critics also claim that freshly prepared foods cannot easily have an accurate calorie count attached to them. Although the FSA have already agreed to allow restaurateurs to put calorie ranges against each item.

For sure it is easier to provide calorie information for mass produced standardized products - food on the go such as sandwiches, burgers, fries and pizza slices.

But the momentum is there for all to see. Soon we will expect to see calorie counts on virtually all menus, in much the same way that the ban on smoking in public places was introduced with little more than a whimper and the vast majority of us wondered what had stopped politicians moving earlier to save thousands of lives.

Will this welcome move expand into coffee stores such as Costa, Starbucks and Caffe Nero? Every little helps.