This restaurant trick doesn’t really help you cut calories — and it can actually backfire

When it comes to your dinner order, knowledge might not be power.

A new study suggests that a popular strategy aimed at helping people make smarter decisions while dining out isn’t just ineffective — it could actually be making things worse.

“In some cases, it might even lead people to make less healthy choices,” Dr. Deidre Popovich, associate professor of marketing at Texas Tech University and lead author of the study, recently warned in The Conversation. 

Americans love a night off from the kitchen. A 2024 survey from US Foods found that the average adult eats at a restaurant nearly five times a month and orders takeout or delivery three times monthly.

But convenience comes with a catch: these foods tend to be loaded with more calories, sodium and saturated fat than home-cooked dishes. Just one extra meal out each week can tack on around two pounds per year, according to the FDA.

To fight the ballooning obesity and diabetes crisis, New York City led the charge in 2008, becoming the first in the nation to require certain food establishments to post calorie information on menus and price boards.

Ten years later, the federal government followed suit, mandating that all restaurants and fast-food chains with 20 or more locations nationwide do the same.

The idea was simple: give people the facts, and they’ll make smarter, healthier choices. But Popovich and her team found that in practice, the well-meaning plan might be backfiring.

In the study, researchers conducted nine experiments involving more than 2,000 participants to see how calorie information impacts people’s perception of different foods.

In one test, people were shown items like salads and cheeseburgers and asked to rate how healthy they thought each one was.

When no calorie information was shown, most had no trouble spotting the big difference between healthy and unhealthy options. But once those numbers entered the picture, things got blurry — their judgments became way less extreme.

In another experiment, participants were asked to guess the calorie counts of different foods. That simple task rattled their confidence in knowing what’s healthy — and that drop led them to rate everything more moderately.

“This pattern repeated across our experiments,” Popovich wrote. “When people are asked to judge how healthy a food item is based on calorie data, that confidence quickly unravels and their healthiness judgments become less accurate.”

The researchers found that in many cases, this meant people gave unhealthy foods a health boost — and unfairly knocked healthier options down a notch.

Other studies have found calorie labels don’t tend move the needle on what people order. But advocates argue that providing nutritional information is still valuable for those who want it.

Popovich emphasized that her team’s findings don’t suggest calorie counts should be removed from menus — but she said they do need more context to be truly helpful.

“Just because information is available doesn’t mean it’s useful,” she wrote.

One fix Popovich suggested: pair calorie counts with visual tools like traffic light labels or overall nutrition scores — both already used in parts of Europe to make healthy choices easier.

She also proposed adding reference points to show how much of a person’s daily calorie intake a meal takes up — though that’s not as simple as it sounds.

Daily calorie needs vary widely from person to person depending on factors such as age, sex, physical activity levels and overall health, making it tough to slap a one-size-fits-all number on the menu.

Current US Dietary Guidelines recommend between 1,600 to 2,400 calories a day for women and 2,000 to 3,000 for men.