Most overweight people I know are keenly aware of how many calories they're consuming, they just can't help themselves.

I don't know how someone can drink a extra large milkshake without feeling like they just dropped a bomb on their digestive system.

When it comes down to it, you need to be in tune with your body. If you need a nutrition label to know whether or not you're feeding yourself right, you're already in trouble.

I fully agree. I've found this to be quite common in NYC now which has already had positive impacts for me. For example, just yesterday a friend wanted to grab a smoothie and after looking at the caloric values, I ended up making a selection that had at least half the calories I would have consumed had I just gone by ingredient listing alone. Smoothies can be deceptive!

The FDA already has some mandates[1]. Using your example, Starbucks falls under those mandates, and if you look at the Starbucks menu at their stores they do contain the calories of the drinks.

The real problem is that often times the calories listed are not 100% accurate.

[1] http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/Labelin...

Casey Neistat made a fun little video[1] that explores this a bit. Without spoilers, it was a bit surprising just how off some of the food is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2lna5Wxuo

Saw that a while back. It is pretty interesting how off most were. Makes you wonder about all foods.

They'd need to be accurate labels though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2lna5Wxuo

We're already doing it in many places, it's mandated by the FDA for certain establishments like McDonald's. And all we hear about is Americans getting fatter and fatter. So maybe we could chill with the paternalism? When I moved out of the house I was done with having parents tell me what to do.

If a piece of information is telling you what to do that's your own problem. Other people may actually prefer it when they have are able to make informed decisions.

In the 80s and 90s they used to sell little paperback books that contained all the calorie information for all the popular chains in the US. People who wanted to be informed bought them.

Now you have the internet. There's literally no excuse. If you want that information you can pull out your smartphone and look it up, right there, standing in the line.

If you are a restaurant owner, it's just one more choice that's been taken away from you - what you want to put on your signs. You may think it's trivial, but it adds up. These choices are never ours to make again.

Although you could google calorie counts in every meal you buy, the vast majority of people don't because of a) it would be tedious b) our body is telling us to eat calories and resisting the urge to think too much about what we are eating and c) everyone else would think you were a bit weird when you were looking up calories instead of having a conversation.

As a customer you don't get a choice whether or not you get exposed to a lot of intrusive advertising encouraging you to eat more (at least in your McDonald's example). It seems to me this is in a small way redressing that balance.

In purely pragmatic terms you are balancing the health of the population (heart attacks, strokes, mental state quality) against the right of a multinational restaurant chain to be slightly more profitable. I think it is well worth it. There are far more egregious abuses of personal liberty you could complain about.

This is just utter baloney. The information exists. You can get it before you leave the house. Standing in line was just an example of how absurdly easy it is.

Enough with treating the population like babies.

This isn't even going to have any effect! And it would still be wrong to do even if it made everyone skinny.

This argument borders on the absurd. Government/voters have regulated commerce since the inception of the United States. You benefit from plenty of regulation mandating additional information. A decade ago, airlines weren't required to include additional fees in their advertised prices. Now they are. I find it bizarre that requiring companies engaged in interstate commerce to provide information germane to the business transaction to be babying consumers.

If we as HN commenters praise a reduction of 1 second of latency for an RPC call to a microservice, surely reducing the latency for consumers standing in line by 5 minutes is laudable! Especially because of the low burden by fast food owners!

If you want to discuss some other encroachment of liberty by the government, feel free. But this proposal in isolation is reasonable.

If you don't think this is going to have an effect, the cost of this is that calories are going to be presented on a menu which customers can choose to look at or not. I am genuinely bemused as to why anyone would find this offensive.

Do you think alcoholic drinks should be labelled with the percentage of alcohol contained? Should food be labelled with the ingredients? Should you be allowed to know if your food contains nuts? And so on.

Alcoholic drinks aren't universally labeled, and even when they are the value is dubious. You can see a proof number on liquor bottles but that tells you nothing about its effects on your physiology. You still have to educate yourself.

You can argue a compelling interest for labeling food allergens, because they can kill people almost immediately. Calories can't.

> In the 80s and 90s they used to sell little paperback books that contained all the calorie information for all the popular chains in the US.

How well did that work?

Today more than a third of Americans are obese.

It worked well for the people that cared to use the information.

A third of Americans are obese. You know what will fix that? A pill that reverses obesity. Invent that and I promise you every obese person will take it. Nobody likes being fat. Until that day, all these other "solutions" are just authoritarian feel-good nonsense.

And you assume everyone has access to a smartphone? Here is a newsflash: they don't. Actually the people who need this info the most often don't have access to a smartphone. Can you guess who these people are?

Go to the public library. Get a piece of paper and a pencil. Look up info on internet. Write it down. Ask librarian if you need help.