Opinion: Calorie counts should never be included on restaurant menus

“Calories”. A dreaded word for anyone suffering and recovering from any form of disordered eating.

To anyone with a healthy eating pattern, calories are just the little numbers on the back of a packet; meaningless characters with no significance. For someone experiencing disordered eating habits, these seemingly small numbers can be the difference between going hungry or not.

So whilst adding calorie counts to restaurant menus is an idea that may be helpful in theory, it is so damaging in reality. Restaurants should be a place of comfort and recovery. Somewhere you can take time off from your dieting regimes and strict meal plans. They should not be another place of fear.

For the average person this initiative may change nothing, it may even help them make a healthier choice. However for people suffering and recovering from eating disorders, it risks throwing them back down to the bottom of the ladder. Any step forward to progress will be faced with two steps back.

Having struggled with disordered eating myself, I know how difficult it can be to speak out and start your recovery. You fall into a spiral which continually worsens until you can't go back. I felt silly even telling one friend about my issues. Recovery felt embarrassing and like a betrayal of the progress I had made to lose weight. I think the hardest thing about eating disorders is their competitiveness- you feel like you have to outdo yourself, see how little calories you can consume or how long you can go without eating. It's still difficult for me to even think about eating a meal without calculating how many calories it will be. My life revolved around it and it eventually became so hard to detach a plate of food to the numbers calculated in my head. Adding calories to restaurants is yet another reminder on how much less I could be eating. It encourages calorie obsession and unhealthy behaviours which eventually spiral into full eating disorders.

You may be wondering “well why should we cater to such a small minority of the population?” This issue is unfortunately likely to affect a large number of people. Over 4 million people in the UK are estimated to suffer from eating disorders, and 6.4% of all adults display signs of eating disorders. These figures are not even including all those who have unreported disordered habits with eating.

It is also an issue that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Calorie counting is often associated with anorexia, bulimia and avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) disorders which are dangerous and potentially life threatening. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rates among all psychiatric disorders, and Anorexia Nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder in adolescence. Of those surviving, 50% recover, whereas 30% improve and 20% remain chronically ill.

And the amount of people being admitted to hospitals with eating disorders is only increasing, especially within young people. Since 2003, the number of hospital admissions for eating disorders has increased by by over 35%.

The pressures of social media on impressionable young people is undoubtedly a major pipeline into disordered eating. ‘Thinspo’, diet culture, and the promotion of skinny products on sites like TikTok and Instagram make it all the harder to accept and love your body for what it is. One wrong interaction and the algorithm shifts all your content to promote disordered habits. As I mentioned before, these disorders are competitive: seeing similar content makes you feel like you're never starved enough, never skinny enough, not suffering enough.

Similarly, diet culture and calorie obsessive behaviours only grow within universities. You will often hear jokey comments such as “i'm not eating so I can get drunk quicker” or “i'm saving my calories for the food tonight.” The normalisation and conversationalist nature of these comments eventually drill into your mind until they are no longer passing comments, but an actual lifestyle. The obsession grows until the effects are irreversible.

Calories for most major restaurants can be found on their websites nutritional sheets. If someone truly wants to know what they are eating, they can access it that way. Adding them to a menu for all to see turns restaurants into a place of fear; leaving you with a sense of guilt and shame for choosing that higher calorie option. This Initiative, whilst seemingly unharmful, is likely to spark more and more people into becoming calorie obsessed.

Edited by Pia Cooper