Obamacare Health Care Reform's Restaurant Calorie Content Mandate

I did not know, til I read it this morning, that the health care reform known as Obamacare, signed into law in March of 2010, mandates that restaurants with 20 or more locations and vending machines with more than 13 locations, reveal the caloric content of the food they are making available to the calorie clueless public.

This part of Obamacare is part of the "community health" umbrella of the health care reforms.

It's not just restaurants and vending machines that will be required to post caloric content. Grocery stores, coffee houses and bakeries will also have to abide by this new law if they have 20 or more locations.

McDonald's has long had calorie/nutrition information available for the asking.

Nutrition information is already on most of the food products you can buy in a grocery store. That's been the case for a long time.

A lot of restaurants already point out the healthy options on their menus.

The Food and Drug Administration estimates this new law will impact around 280,000 of America's 600,000 restaurants.

Which means more than half of the restaurants will still be able to serve the public steak and bacon without revealing the fat content.

Some food purveyors have been getting exemptions to the new law. The movie theater industry got an exclusion by claiming they don't serve full meals. So, movie theaters will not be forced to reveal that that large bag of buttered popcorn they are selling you has 58 grams of fat and 1,050 calories.

I really don't think making nutritional information available in some food purveyor's establishments is going to alter eater's eating patterns.

I know a lot of people are a bit dumb when it comes to what they eat.

But, really, most obese people know what is making them fat.

Why does the government not be even more intrusive? How about a law mandating that you have to get a license to purchase certain types of food? You go in for a checkup, the checkupper determines you are not over weight, issuing you an All Clear To Eat card, that you must swipe into some sort of card reader before you are allowed to buy a 540 calorie Big Mac.

Makes sense to me.