If you knew it would take
two hours of intensive walking to burn off that dessert tempting you at
dinnertime, would you still choose it?
That’s the question brought up in an article by CTVnews.ca that looks
into a new study that finds that restaurant guests who look at menus that show
them an estimate of how much exercise is needed to burn off calories tend to
choose lower-calorie options. Sounds
like a great idea, but where is all this information really coming from, and is
there enough evidence to back it up?
The article’s general target audience seems to be
individuals that dine out somewhat frequently,
“Registered dietician
Leslie Beck finds the study results interesting, “I guess what this suggests is
that if you eat out in restaurants on a regular basis…”
I believe the motive was
to make those people who dine out at restaurants frequently to believe as
though they need these calories put into context, leading to them being
healthier. If the food and restaurant industry get a demand of consumers
who feel as though this is going to benefit them, or even get government health
officials involved, more restaurants might be willing to add that information
to their menus.
But this also brings
up the conflict of an additional activity system, the restaurants. Restaurant
menus are typically written with a mixture of plain and official styles, so how
do they feel about journalists, who normally write in the official style,
believing that they should change their menus into a plain style so they can be
better understood? And what business is
going to voluntarily display anything that discourages someone from buying
their product? It’s a complication and
battle between activity systems. Is the
study provided even broad enough to convince enough people that they need this
information in their menus?
The article itself
admits that this was just one group of people, “We can’t generalize to a
population over age 30…”, and they even state that “It’s hard to say why the
combination of the calorie and the exercise information made a bigger
difference than simply the calorie information”. So how can this large truth that putting
calories into context will make people make better meal decisions be based on
only one study, furthermore a study that still needs a lot of work?
I believe the mixture
of plain and official styles is used to try to make this article seem more
scholarly and trustworthy, when really it is not very credible
information. For instance, the fact that
there was a study done on this topic makes it seem legitimate and official, but
then realizing that this entire article is based on that one study mentioned
doesn’t make the information seem so believable. There are other studies briefly mentioned but
never in depth,
“The researchers say
that the majority of studies done of the effectiveness on displaying calories
on menus show that the menus do not lead to fewer calories ordered or eaten.
They say that contextualizing those calories could be an effective strategy to
encourage people to eat less.”
Why aren’t any other
studies discussed deeper? This makes me
as the reader wonder if there are studies that contradict the one presented in
this article, and if maybe the author is trying to keep this information from
the reader to prove their point that putting calories into context on menus
makes people eat healthier.
Most of the article
is written in very plain style, as the majority of the sentences are very
short, clear, and to the point. They
appear to be easy to understand, and the main ideas are repeated throughout the
article. There is the use of exemplum,
“Researchers at Texas
Christian University recently conducted a study of 300 men and women under the
age of 30. They broke them into three groups, giving each group a menu with the
same food choices. One group received a regular menu; the second received a menu that
listed the calories of each food item; the third got a menu that listed the calories
as well as the number of minutes of brisk walking needed to burn those
calories. The
study found that the people who got the third menu not only tended to order
less, they also ate less compared to those who got the menu without calorie
labels. Results
of the study were presented this week at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting
in Boston.”
Followed by a very large
use of metabasis,
“The researchers say
putting calories into context seemed to have an effect on the people they
studied.”
"This study
suggests there are benefits to displaying exercise minutes to a group of young
men and women,” senior researcher Dr. Meena Shah said in a statement.
“I guess what this
suggests is that if you eat out in restaurants on a regular basis, knowing and
seeing that (calorie and exercise) information could help you manage your
weight.”
“She says it seems
that putting calorie information into a context that most people can relate to
– brisk walking – helps to make people think a little harder about their food
choices.”
Because
of the fact that there is not much evidence besides the one study mentioned in
the beginning of the article, yet the article keeps repeating the fact that
this idea is effective, makes this article quite biased. Even when things are in the official style,
they are quite deceptive and confusing. They
don’t provide any alternative options or suggestions, and they don’t have
enough evidence to really prove their point. Also, they’re often vague as
to whom they are speaking about. For example, in the last paragraph it
says, “The researchers say that the majority of studies...” but don’t explain
who these “researchers” are.
Initially after reading this article, I thought maybe
that for most people who don’t know much about plain vs. official style
wouldn’t realize how flawed this information was, since there was research
provided that seems to agree with their main idea, making it seem official and
professional. But, I read the reader
comments, and found that many readers found this articles information to be
misleading for many different reasons.
One reader brought up
the fact that putting the calorie intake “into context” was actually confusing,
because if for instance the only thing you eat in a day is a 500 calorie
muffin, it wouldn’t take two hours of walking to burn it off, because a person
can burn around 2000 calories a day from normal activity. It’s really the calories above and beyond
that level that someone has to worry about.
Another reader pointed out that the relationship between calories and
exercise is really not that simple.
“People of different weights will burn dramatically different calories
doing the same activity.” So the whole
idea of contextualizing calorie information in general seems to be flawed, and
many readers wondered if it was really okay to give the public misleading
information. Also, how can an article
that uses plain style, infused with the official style to seemingly mislead
readers, have the right to tell restaurants that they need to put their calorie
information into plain style?
By: Katie TerBeest
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