Posted by Seyifunmi
What do you think about a label on food which tell you how much you have to work out to burn the calories you consume from that food? The content of calories in foods have been something printed on labels but it appears many don’t understand it or simply ignore it.
What if — instead of showing the calories — food labels show you how many hours you have to work out to burn the calories. If you saw that you need to work for one and half hour to burn the calories you are about to consume, I bet you wouldn’t.
Since calorie counts on food packaging haven’t stopped us from getting fatter, scientists are proposing exercise labels on food packages like chocolate, soda and chips.
If you knew you’d have to run for 15 minutes, ride a bicycle for 23mins or swim for 13 mins to burn off the 138 calories in a sugary soda, would you still drink it?
What Do Food Labels Do Now?
At the moment food labels aim to help us decide what to eat by showing us the composition but some people believe they could do a lot more. One of those people is Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health.
Labels Showing How Much You Need To Exercise To Burn Calories
He said, “People find symbols much easier to understand than numerical information, and activity equivalent calorie labels are easy to understand, particularly for lower socioeconomic groups who often lack nutritional knowledge and health literacy,” Cramer wrote in a commentary in the British Medical Journal published Wednesday.
“For example, the calories in a can of fizzy drink take a person of average age and weight about 26 minutes to walk off.”
The idea is to have a picture that shows this. “So for example if it was a can of soda, you would have a pictorial of a stick man running and it would say 26 minutes, or you would have walking 40 minutes or you would have swimming,” Cramer told NBC News.
Even though this seems promising, some people don’t buy the idea because they believe people will ignore it anyway.
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