Study looks at more effective ways to show calories

WASHINGTON — Walk into almost any chain restaurant and you will see calorie counts right next to prices on the menu, but that may not be the best way to convince consumers to make healthy choices.

“Our thought was, is there a better way to do this?” says Sarah Bleich, an associate professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University.

Bleich led a research team from the Bloomberg School of Public Health that tested out different messages, looking for a way to take the term calorie and make it applicable to everyday life.

They used corner stores in Baltimore for their laboratory. Bleich says they focused on teens in low income black neighborhoods “because if you look at obesity risk among children, it is highest among black adolescents and they are high consumers of sugary beverages.”

The researchers randomly placed four different signs near beverage displays. Some listed calories or sugar content, but only one had a big impact.

Bleich says when teens saw a sign that told them they would need to walk five miles to work off the 250 calories in an average 16-ounce bottle of soda, “they purchased fewer calories, they had a lower likelihood of buying a sugary beverage, they bought a smaller sugary beverage, and some of them even walked out without buying anything at all.”

But would this message work with the general population? The researchers say they are convinced it could. “If you made information about calories easily interpretable for everyone, I think you would see that effect,” says Bleich.

The research findings, published online in the American Journal of Public Health, come as all restaurants with more than 20 outlets face an early 2015 deadline to display calorie counts on their menus.

The researchers say with the new year rapidly approaching, policymakers should rethink how that information is communicated to the public.

Bleich envisions menu boards where instead of the calorie count, there would a stick figure of a person walking and a number of miles that correlates to the number of calories in an item.

“Let’s say for a hamburger, it would say six miles, for french fries, it would say eight,” she explains.

The Johns Hopkins researchers say that simple message — a walking stick figure and a number — could have a big impact, noting that the teens in their study were still making better choices at the corner store six weeks after the signs came down.

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