LOS ANGELES — You really want to know what it’ll take to work off Thanksgiving dinner? Let’s just say you’d better cancel your plans to watch football after dinner, or to go shopping on Friday: It could take you into the weekend to work it all off.
In a bid to focus Americans on controlling their weight, public health advocates have embraced posting calories, labeling nutritional content and offering all manner of helpful and eye-catching logos to draw consumers’ attention to “better-for-you choices.” But there’s mounting evidence that no form of consumer information conveys the potential impact of a food choice on one’s weight quite as powerfully as do “sweat equivalents.”
Sweat equivalents leave little room for self-delusion. They don’t require a hungry teenager at the corner grocery store to know how many calories a day she should be taking in, or what percentage of that total that bag of potato chips represents. They simply say: “If you eat this, this is how long you’d have to jog (or swim, or jump rope or play basketball) to work it off.”
Simple’s good. And in experiments, posting sweat equivalents powerfully steered consumers toward water over sugar-sweetened soda, pretzels over chips, salads over cheeseburgers.