Today, an AP article reported on a proposal being considered in the United Kingdom that would change the labeling of food, especially snack food. Instead of displaying the calories of an item, the chips, candy bar, or beverage would instead display how long it would take to run or walk off the calories consumed.
An interesting idea for sure, and on the surface, I could get behind the idea. First, few of us move as much as we should. FitBits and other activity trackers help, but we have to remember to wear them, pay attention to their cues, and act on those prompts to achieve our movement goals. If our food gave us hard data about how much we need to move in relation to what we eat, that could be quite helpful.
Unfortunately, the two measurements are quite different from each other when we apply them to individuals. Consuming calories is the same for all of us: if I eat a 200 calorie blueberry muffin and you eat the same type of muffin, our caloric intake is the same. However, how we burn that 200 calories is completely different. Burning calories has a lot of variables ; gender, weight, height, age, BMI, normal activity level, medications, diagnoses, and digestive health. All these variables make up our metabolism.
Metabolism prevents this idea of putting activity recommendation on a food package from being truly scientific or super useful. However, I still like the spirit of the idea and hope they continue to work out some kinks and come up with a workable solution because in the end, we all need to move more!
