Fast food is a difficult subject. For families on the go, students and traveling business workers the fast food option is inevitable at times. It is a quick alternative to a home cooked meal. This speedy alternative, however, is a quick way to eat a lot of calories. Fast food chains like Mcdonalds, Burger King and Starbucks give their health information on-line. Subway often advertises their calorie menus at their stores or on-line. This is not enough for city health officials in New York, however. The New York Times’ article “City Tries Again With Labeling Fast-Food Menus” discusses the new proposed plan that would make restaurants with 15 outlets or more across the country have to show their calorie information on their menus.

They want to have this information posted to help obesity. What I do not get, however, is how this will help. The general public knows how bad fast food is for you, yet they still resort to going there. Calorie information is publicized on television and can be found on the internet. If people care about the calories they consume they will not be going to fast food. If they must go to one of these restaurants and want to know the calorie information they will look it up. Once the customer is already making the stop to this restaurant they probably already intend to buy something, so why would the calorie information influence their decision. It is obvious that the more fries or the bigger the burger you have, the more fattening it will be, so who needs a menu to tell them how much more. If this menu is what people want to see then it should be posted, but I do not this it will help obesity.

Fast food is not the only factor in obesity either. If the person’s lifestyle lends itself to ending up with fast food every night then I would say it is the life style that is poor, not necessarily the fast food. Not saying that fast food is not bad, but if you have fast food once in a while it is not going to cause obesity. Obesity starts with bigger issues like genetics or poor habits and fast food adds to these issues, probably does not cause them. There are much greater factors that play into becoming obese. Trying to decrease obesity must begin somewhere, but I am skeptical this step will help much.