It should be required by federal law...

The costs of having food so perfectly measured, processed, and analyzed in the lab would completely destroy the restaurant business.

Plus, it would destroy the joys of eating out, as cooks wouldn't be able to quickly innovated new dishes. Their hands would be rigidly tied, and they'd have to use robots or something to cook, in order to get everything within an extremely narrow standard. Hell with that noise.

Fast food on the other hand is practically produced by machines already. Totally different story. Real restaurants shouldn't be held to same standards as fast food....or to the same standard as frozen hot pockets either.

How does the government know?

OPs point is, government can make them tell us.

Please stay away from my chef owned and operated restaurants. Some of us manage to stay fit and healthy without stressing over every damn ingredient. I love the, "hey I haven't paid any attention to my health in decades but now I care so I have to know everything" mentality on here.

seriously, I go down the road to a locally owned sushi/seafood place at least once a week and they do not post their nutritional information and it has not happened my progress one bit...

OMG! Do you know that there's white rice in sushi? WHITE rice? That stuff will kill you . . .

I'm astonished at the number of Americans who not only want fewer rights and protections, they want to throw out the ones their predecessors fought so hard to attain, too. They also tend to be the same Americans who don't know how to debate but instead make personal attacks.

Really??? There was a war fought for nutritional information to be provided by every restaurant???

YIKES! I must have slept through that history class.

you don't remember patrick henry's lest famous pamphlet…"Give me nutritional information, or give me death"….I also recall that federalist paper number 69 was titled "the inalienable right of the american people to have nutritional information posted at every tavern and restaurant"….

I think we should lobby for our 1st Amendment to be modified to include..."the right to nutritional information by all restaurants".

Now that I think about it...didn't Lincoln address "nutritional information" in his address?

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Nutritional Information and dedicated to the proposition that all restaurants will provide it.

if mcdonalds can do it why can't everyoneeee elseeeee.

i know it drives me crazy going out to restaurants and having to pull out my phone as my meal comes so i can make sure to list everything on my plate! haha. but that's life and sometimes ya gotta just work to make it work.

I agree, but I know they don't want to do it, because the nutrition is non-existent. For example my wife and I went to Chilis this past Friday and my Basic Bacon burger and fries had more sodium in it then my day allows for. My day calls for 2500mg of sodium, my dinner had 3600mg, 50% more then desired, if people really knew what was in the dinner, my guess is many might stop, but then again the calories are on there so maybe not, the only reason we went is because we were given a gift card otherwise, forget it!

Regulation is a tricky thing, supposedly this country was built on getting away from over-regulation, yet at the same time, the horrid nutritional content of restaurants causes all sorts of problems whereby the medical cost is picked up by the taxpayer via medicare, which pays half of all health care expenditures in the US. Many older people with congestive heart failure will go out to eat once in a while for their date night and end up in the ER because of the sodium content, but the restaurant has no incentive to change because their is a line out the door.

I agree, but I know they don't want to do it, because the nutrition is non-existent. For example my wife and I went to Chilis this past Friday and my Basic Bacon burger and fries had more sodium in it then my day allows for. My day calls for 2500mg of sodium, my dinner had 3600mg, 50% more then desired, if people really knew what was in the dinner, my guess is many might stop, but then again the calories are on there so maybe not, the only reason we went is because we were given a gift card otherwise, forget it!

Regulation is a tricky thing, supposedly this country was built on getting away from over-regulation, yet at the same time, the horrid nutritional content of restaurants causes all sorts of problems whereby the medical cost is picked up by the taxpayer via medicare, which pays half of all health care expenditures in the US. Many older people with congestive heart failure will go out to eat once in a while for their date night and end up in the ER because of the sodium content, but the restaurant has no incentive to change because their is a line out the door.

If you think/know that restaurant food is so C**P - DON'T GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO . F.F.S Cook your own food and stop whining.

I may have a stronger opinion if I didn't think the nutritional information is at best a very rough guess anyway. There's just too much variation in who is making the meals. There are basically no restaurant meals that I can eat that I can make fit into my daily life, so I just keep going out to eat to an every once in a while thing and try to eat lightly for the other meals that day because I know there's just no way I'm going to know for sure how many calories are in my meal (other than a lot.)

It's done in parts of Maryland but not in Virginia. And it's only done for fast food or chain restaurants.

or... you could download the MyFitnessPal app. (shrug)

Do I like when a restaurant has the nutritional information YES, do I think we need the government mandating yet another area of our lives NO! One meal isn't making a difference estimate what you had and move on, and if you are so worried about it don't go out to eat at that establishment.

I so agree with this! ^^^

Does anyone else get as frustrated as I do when they go out to eat?

Nope. I know how to use the Internet, though.

It's done here in California.

... only in chain restuarants with more than 20 locations. I was there last week and most places I went did not have it.

But in for the coddling with the information dump that most people will ignore. In California every single restaurant had a carcinogen warning and the end result is a popluation of inured people.

But if a carcinogen counting website ever catches on, California will be the state for dining out. Also, I've just bookmarked California's carcinogen list for the next time I find some new and bizarre ingredient on a list of whatever I'm planning to eat.

The government regulates MANY things, including spending a half a trillion dollars on welfare and PROMOTING it through advertisement, and you are attacking my suggestion to mandate that all food have nutrition facts listed on it? alright then...

Your train of thought ... it BURNS!

Federal government needs needs to GTFO. State Government as well.

Personal responsibility is where its at. Personal freedom to do as you want in the pursuit of happiness should be unfettered. YOU and only YOU should be responsible for your actions and consequences. But most people are too lazy to put forth the effort and gladly embrace the "nanny state". Screw that!

.... Demanding to know isn't out of line, ......

Demanding is well out of line and incredibly rude .. asking or requesting would be more polite and more likely to solicit a polite response... :frown:

Yes, because my country's history is replete with examples of workers and customers asking nicely and getting results!

*sarcasm in the extreme*

Owners of companies don't do things because they're asked. They have to be forced the vast majority of the time.

Oh, look, another crusader out to fight the good fight again evil chef owned restaurants everywhere . . . Those places prepare tasty food fresh from the market. We need to make sure we make their lives as difficult as possible. Let's create a new agency, a few new regulations, hey, why does the economy continue to suck again? I don't understand . . .

Our economy sucks because we allowed our jobs to be outsourced to every sweatshop running dictatorship on the globe.

It might not matter to you whether that pasta has 600 calories or 900, but for someone more sedentary with less than 300 calories between maintenance and weight loss or maintenance and weight gain it does matter.

Well if you are sedentary maybe you should stay out of restaurants and work on improving that aspect of your life. If you spent more time focusing on improving your health than you could go out to a nice dinner and enjoy it. But that requires getting off the couch and walking outside.

Stop blaming everyone else for your problems.