New rules requiring calorie information to be displayed on menus and food labels came into force 6 April 2022. The changes – which were approved by Parliament in 2021 – mean it is now a legal requirement for large businesses with more than 250 employees, including cafes, restaurants and takeaways, to display calorie information of non-prepacked food and soft drinks. Calorie information will need to be displayed on menus, online menus, third party apps, food delivery platforms and food labels at the point a customer is making their food and drink choices. As well as listing the calories for each food item, menus and labels will also need to include daily recommended calorie needs.
The legislation, which forms part of the government’s strategy to tackle obesity, aims to ensure people can make more informed, healthier choices when it comes to eating food out or ordering takeaways. Displaying calorie information may also encourage businesses to provide lower calorie options for their customers.
It is estimated that overweight and obesity related conditions across the UK cost the NHS £6.1 billion each year. Almost two-thirds (63%) of adults in England are overweight or living with obesity and 40% of children leave primary school overweight or obese. Obesity is also the second biggest cause of cancer across the UK. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the impact that obesity can have on people’s health, and as part of its drive to level up the health of the nation, the government is also asking smaller businesses to adopt calorie labelling.
Buying food on the go or getting takeaways are increasingly important to people. On average the portions of food or drink that people eat out or eat as takeaway meals contain twice as many calories as their equivalent bought in a shop, where labelling is much more common. Research suggests that food people eat outside the home makes up 20 to 25% of adult calorie intake
The types of businesses covered by the requirement include:
- restaurants, fast food outlets, cafes, pubs, and supermarkets
- home delivery services and third-party apps selling food that is in scope of the legislation
- cafes and takeaways within larger shops and venues, such as supermarkets, department stores, and entertainment venues such as cinemas
- specialist food stores, delicatessens, sweet shops and bakeries
- contract catering – for example, for events and canteens
- domestic transport businesses including planes, trains, ferries and other forms of water transport within the UK
Not everyone is happy about this new legislation and I’m not referring to the businesses affected. People with eating disorders, some fear, will be negatively affected.
Fears Surrounding Calorie Labelling Rules
The government, in their wisdom, has recently made it mandatory for businesses of over 250 employees to display the calorie content of the food and drinks they serve. Whilst this has been widely accepted by the hospitality industry as a policy aimed at reducing obesity, an issue we can all agree does need to be addressed, this is not the way to do it. That is not a statement of opinion, but a statement of fact. Calories have been mandated on menus in US restaurants since 2018 and have since done nothing to reduce the amount of calories in food, or to counter obesity. A report from 2012 even suggests that calorie labelling encourages consumers to buy products with more calories, not fewer. Increased calorie labelling has been discussed for a long time, alongside its clear ineffectiveness.
Sophia
A woman from Liverpool has shared her fears surrounding calorie labelling and the risks it can pose for people like her. The 30-year-old from Toxteth describes her relationship with food as “complicated”, after battling with depression, OCD, anxiety, and anorexia for six-years. Sophie Cook, founder of Sophie’s Kitchen – a bakery business based in Liverpool 8, has spoken about her struggles with food. She said: “It took me a while to realise I was ill, but I guess that’s the thing of mental health.
“When you’re struggling yourself, you know exactly how hard it can be, so you spend so much time making sure everyone around you doesn’t feel like the same. You lose touch with yourself. I used to love going out with my mates for food and drinks. Slowly over time I found myself missing out on more and more social events.”
She taught herself to bake, the one thing she could do to “make people smile”. Unfortunately Sophie’s health continued to spiral downwards, and she was admitted into a psychiatric unit called Oaktrees in Wirral. Sophie said: “I was hospitalised for seven-months in total, four of which I spent in a wheelchair. Over time they’d allow me a few hours off the hospital grounds. “I decided that if I wanted to get better I needed to get better for me, not just because I was doing what the doctors told me to do. I started to look at what would motivate me to get better, and I found a course in Liverpool Community College for baking and cake decorating.”
Finding the class motivated Sophie to get herself well again. Printing the college application and sticking it to her hospital room wall was a “constant reminder” to her, to be well enough to go to college and complete the course. She said: “The day I weighed enough to leave hospital, I discharged myself. I haven’t seen a doctor or psychiatrist since. “Different things work for different people and I’ve seen first-hand how much professional support can help other people. Personally, I took the time to make myself aware of what triggers me, what I find hard and what makes me happy, but there are still triggers and calories are one of them.”
Becoming aware of the new calorie labelling laws in May 2021, Sophie was “angry” about the idea behind it and still is. There were many petitions to try and stop the law from going ahead but “they’ve all been ignored”. The baker said: “I didn’t and still don’t understand what will be gained by putting calories on menus – most organisations already have nutritional values available and people can go online to find everything they need on most corporate websites. But seeing calories on a menu could have serious repercussions for someone struggling with an eating disorder.
“To this day seeing calories still makes me feel anxious. I’ve spent years figuring out my triggers and working on them, but one thing I can’t shake off is the impact of seeing that number. “I’ve taken steps to educate myself on what calories are and how they’re built up, I’m now able to look at a meal and understand where those numbers actually come from. That a high number doesn’t necessarily make it a bad choice.
“But no matter how far I’ve come I still find myself noting the calories on what I’m eating. I will openly admit that when I’m having a bad day, my eating disorder will creep back in, and no matter how much I’ve taught myself my brain will forget all of this and I’ll struggle with certain foods based on the calorie content.”
The Government actually need to understand mental health. Anyone can read books and get qualifications, but it doesn’t mean you actually understand how people feel – and that is the most important thing about mental health. “Mental health isn’t black and white, people can have exactly the same mental health ‘issue’ but feel completely different, and that’s why education is so important. People need to be educated [about mental health] from a young age, not just because it’s a trend on social media every time a celebrity dies due to mental health, or it’s a day like world mental health day”
Noah
“Every time I eat in a restaurant, I am reminded of the stress of eating out when my sister had anorexia. There’s only so many times you can ask a waiter ‘to come back later’, to sit for thirty minutes whilst she stares at a menu, obsessively reading the ingredients list as my parents near a rage.
For those without an eating disorder, the calorie statistic is quickly forgotten when browsing a menu. Yet the leading eating disorder charity Beat has stressed that ‘calorie labelling exacerbates eating disorders of all kinds’. Personally, I think it is best to describe the anorexic mind as Edi. When I was first introduced to the term, sitting on my Mum’s bed whilst she forced us to listen to an extract from an eating disorder support guide, he was merely an ‘Eating Disorder Individual’. But naming the ‘voice in the head’, giving it an identity separate to the individual’s own (to me he’s most assuredly male), has since made anorexia much more understandable to me. You see, Edi thrives off calorie information. My Mum’s fury as she ripped the traffic light sticker off a packet of doughnuts, so my sister wouldn’t be obsessed by the trio of red blotches, has never left my mind. Calorie labels have been widely attacked on all fronts by those with any sort of experience with eating disorders. Whilst the government highlights that the pandemic has revealed the ‘impact that obesity can have on people’s health and health outcomes’, it has also led to a stark and worrying increase in those suffering from eating disorders. The number of young people accessing treatment for eating disorders has risen by two-thirds since before the pandemic. It seems ironic given the government’s actions that in reporting this statistic the NHS listed ‘a preoccupation with checking calorie or other ingredient content in food’ as a top indicator of an eating disorder.
Displaying calorie information on menus is a step towards furthering a culture that believes food is the enemy and a poison that only leads to obesity and ill-health, rather than a vital element of human life. Seeing calories as the be all and end all of food and health ignores the complex web of wonderful benefits food has, whether in its nutrients, or in the social ability it grants people to connect to others, to share a moment together. Calorie information does not just harm the 2% diagnosed with an eating disorder, it harms us all. The many articles published recently with the headline ‘Which high street meals are the most and least fattening?’ (take The Guardian for an example) reflects a highly damaging fetishization of calorie content. How many calories a person eats in a restaurant, and its effect on their health, means nothing if not compared to the food they eat outside of that meal, the amount of exercise they do, or the needs they have as an individual in response to their own health. Nor is calorie counting itself in any way a healthy process.”
Hope Virgo’s Open Letter
“We are writing to you just one week after the calorie legislation has come into force and are extremely concerned about the detrimental consequences that this will have – not just on people affected by eating disorders, but also wider society.
With 16% of the adult population screening positive for an eating disorder and millions more suffering from eating disorders, what is proposed as a “common-sense approach” – focusing on weight and calorie counting – is incredibly destructive. Indeed, this approach stands in stark contradiction to the approach favoured by clinicians, who seek to avoid the psychologically damaging focus on weight, calorie counting, and BMI.
Calorie counting in and of itself does not lead to healthy outcomes. Instead of becoming fixated on numbers we should be focusing on wider health messages. Since the legislation came in to play, I have been inundated by messages from individuals, carers of those affected by eating disorders and those in recovery from eating disorders, who are already reporting of the destruction that this new measure is causing. We are also concerned that this will teach young people, children and the general public to watch or count calories which can only breed and compound disordered eating.
It is also important to emphasise that we live in a society where disordered eating is normalised. This is extremely unhealthy and adding calories to menus will only exacerbate this. We will have children restricting their food intake and feeling concerned about calorific consumption, which could lead to an increase in eating disorders – illnesses with the highest and most preventable mortality rates and ones that costs the UK over £11.4 billion a year. Obesity prevention policies need to be evidence=based and coordinated with eating disorder prevention. Calorie labels don’t say anything about the nutritional value and enjoyment of food: on the contrary, they introduce guilt and unhealthy preoccupation with numbers.”
You cannot solve obesity without changing the way that we engage with food. You cannot solve obesity without considering that other side of the coin, without considering those with eating disorders.
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