Calorie-Tracking? There’s an App for That.

Imagine a world where people lost weight simply by tracking their calorie intake every day and making adjustments until they found the number of calories needed to maintain their ideal weight. No juice fasts, no cabbage soup and no hysterical breakdowns at the sight of a bread basket; just simple decisions based on numbers and need. While it is possible for Canadians to one day live in this world, we don’t. Most Canadians (and people around the world) have no clue how many calories they consume in one day.

Oh sure, some of us try to estimate how many calories worth of bread and butter we greedily gulped from the bread basket during lunch or how many hours we would need to spend on a treadmill to work off that piece of cheesecake we had for dessert during a night on the town. But most of the time our desperate attempts to keep within a reasonable daily calorie and fat limit fail miserably. And it’s not our fault (really, it’s not). The sad truth is, it can be nearly impossible to calculate your calorie intake, especially if you eat any meals at fast food joints or restaurants. Restaurants and fast food places in Canada are not required to post their nutritional information - calories, fat content, sodium content, etc - on their menus or online. While some chains voluntarily post nutritional facts about the staple items on their menus, none are required to do so by law.

In 2007, it became law for all pre-packaged food to have a nutritional label in Canada. However, the legislation does not apply to restaurants. Restaurants do not even have to give out nutritional information to customers if asked. And there is nothing consumers can do about it. Instead, we must resign to guessing how many calories are in delicious foodstuffs such as the Keg’s popular honey barbeque ribs (the answer is 1,975 calories or roughly an entire day’s worth).

What’s a poor restaurant/fast-food lover to do? Must we sit at home picking at a homemade salad while calculating how many calories balsamic vinegar contains? (By the way, there’s an iPhone app for that.) Should anyone serious about losing weight or maintaining a healthy lifestyle be forced to never frequent their favourite establishments for fear of overeating? No, hungry, health-conscious socialites must demand more of their government (and their restaurants).

Ideally, all restaurants would volunteer lists of nutritional information on their menus or at the very least, by request. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where choosing the wrong appetizer can blow your entire diet and raise your sodium intake to life-threatening levels. Most restaurants and fast food places will not voluntarily provide nutritional information to consumers. The Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association created voluntary guides to develop a standard for nutrition labelling for restaurant chains with mainstay menu items. The guidelines were created five years ago but only 33 national chains have joined the program. It’s naïve to believe that all food establishments, particularly fast food chains, will admit how many calories go into every butter-filled bite of every item on their sinfully-satisfying menu unless they are required by law to do so. Restaurant food and fast food, by nature, is less healthy than meals prepared at home because taste and presentation are the top concerns of professional chefs. When an individual prepares a meal for themselves at home, they are more likely to consider whether a 12-ounce steak really needs to be slathered in butter in order to taste good. Restaurant food is a healthy-eating minefield simply because people do not realize how many calories they are actually consuming, and have no way of finding out.

Eating the occasional fast food burger or enjoying a healthy meal in a restaurant is an experience no one should be denied. People deserve to know what it in their food. People also deserve to make informed decisions about their food, which is impossible to do so if nutritional information is not available at all restaurants and fast-food chains. The federal government must introduce legislation requiring all food-serving establishments to post nutritional information on menus and online. Several American cities and states now have laws forcing restaurants to post nutritional information. Chain restaurants that have 20 outlets or more will soon be required to post caloric counts under U.S. President Barack Obama’s health-reform package. Canada would do well to follow the United State’s example for healthier, well-informed food lovers.