There has been a lot of noise made about calorie counts on labels - the idea being it’s one of those things that might nudge people to make healthier choices.

So much so that in 2018, in the USA, it became mandatory for food chains with more than 20 outlets to label the calories in their food.

But the effectiveness of that is hard to gauge - it’s relied on reporting from customers, which leads to an incomplete picture. The really killer data would be from the chains themselves, but they’re reluctant to share that widely.

That's where new research comes in - and we're joined in the podcast by Joshua Petimar, postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Jason Block, associate professor at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute & Harvard Medical School, to discuss what they've done.

Read the full research:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5837