Providing calorie information labels on menus and food products has a small but important effect at a population level on the choices that people make, a large Cochrane review has concluded.1
UK researchers analysed findings from 25 studies and found that calorie labels on supermarket products and on menus in restaurants lead people to select food with a smaller number of calories. They identified a 1.8% reduction in calories selected when labelling was in place, which they calculated meant 11 fewer kilocalories for a 600 kilocalorie (2.5 MJ) meal.
Their results indicated that there may be a bigger effect of labelling on the food that people actually consumed (rather than just selected), with a 5.9% reduction, but the evidence to support this finding was weaker.
A previous Cochrane review published by the same team suggested a bigger …
