This restaurant trick doesnt really help you cut calories and it can actually backfire

When it comes to your dinner order, knowledge might not be power.A new study suggests that a popular strategy aimed at helping people make smarter decisions while dining out isn’t just ineffective — it could actually be making things worse.“In some cases, it might even lead people to make less healthy choices,” Dr.Deidre Popovich, associate professor of marketing at Texas Tech University and lead author of the study, recently warned in The Conversation. Americans love a night off from the kitchen.

A 2024 survey from US Foods found that the average adult eats at a restaurant nearly five times a month and orders takeout or delivery three times monthly.But convenience comes with a catch: these foods tend to be loaded with more calories, sodium and saturated fat than home-cooked dishes.Just one extra meal out each week can tack on around two pounds per year, according to the FDA.To fight the ballooning obesity and diabetes crisis, New York City led the charge in 2008, becoming the first in the nation to require certain food establishments to post calorie information on menus and price boards.Ten years later, the federal government followed suit, mandating that all restaurants and fast-food chains with 20 or more locations nationwide do the same.The idea was simple: give people the facts, and they’ll make smarter, healthier choices.

But Popovich and her team found that in practice, the well-meaning plan might be backfiring.In the study, researchers conducted nine experiments involving more than 2,000 participants to see how calorie information impacts people’s perception of different foods.In one test, people were shown items like salads and cheeseburgers and asked to rate how healthy they thought each one was.When no calorie information was shown, most had no trouble spotting the big difference between healthy and unhealthy options.But once those numbers entered the picture, things got blurry — their judgments became way less extreme.In another experim...