New Labels
Researchers at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public are recommending that junk food and sodas be packaged with “exercise labels” to let consumers know exactly how much exercise is required to burn off the calorie and fat content within the products. In a study published in the American Journal of Public Health they found for teenagers the most powerful influence was the calorie conversion to exercise minutes. For example, a can of soda takes fifty minutes of jogging on a treadmill to burn off. The truth is that patients underestimate EVERYTHING when it comes to personal behavior and how it relates to health. We think we eat better than we do. We think we are not as fat as we really are. We think are more active than we really are. This new plan would teach them that exercise really cannot make up for poor nutrition habits. Personally, I am all for it.
Changing labels is always interesting, but in this case, I’m not sure you could make them accurate… Don’t people of varying size, muscle mass, etc burn calories at different rates? Whatever number they decide to put on this calorie-conversion label would be inaccurate for many people.