EAT A QUARTER POUNDER, WALK FOR TWO HOURS

Posting calories on restaurant menus hasn’t done much to convince diners to order healthier fare and eat less. But a new study has found that labeling food with a different number—the amount of time you would have to briskly walk to burn it off—seems to be effective. (click below to read more)



Researchers at Texas Christian University gave 300 young adults a menu featuring hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, salads, sodas, and water. A third of the menus had no nutritional labels, a third listed calorie counts for each item, and a third showed the number of minutes of walking it would take to work off each item. The first two groups ordered and ate similarly, but the group that saw how much they would have to exercise to compensate for their choices ordered meals with significantly fewer calories—and then ate less of them. Study author Meena Shah tells NPR.org that more consumers “might think twice’’ about ordering rich foods if they knew the effort required to use up the calories therein. It takes two hours of walking, for instance, to burn off one quarter-pound cheeseburger.