House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier today rolled out the House's version of health care reform. The bill is a 1,990 page whopper, downloadable here. I've been able to poke through it a bit and, beginning at page 1,510, I encountered something that will embiggen the hearts of public health advocates (and frankly the whole bill is a gigantic wet kiss to the public health crowd) and make haters of the Nanny State say, "Told you so."

The House bill mandates for calorie counts of almost any item served at a restaurant (or similar food establishment) owned by a company with 20 or more restaurants in the US as well as on drive-thru menu boards. Currently, only a few cities and counties require such information in the US, notably New York City and King County (Seattle), Washington. So America is about to go from Nanny State cities to the Nanny State nation.

And the trouble with calorie counts is that they seem to have a fairly limited impact on what people eat, according to this New York Times account of a recent study of the calorie count law in NYC. (I have no idea how this is playing out in Seattle so far.) It perplexes me beyond belief that we have a government that doesn't get that people already know a Big Mac is fattening and people are going to order one anyway, calorie count information be damned, because they like Big Macs. This calorie count thing nationally is going to be expensive to implement and will likely not change human behavior much. I cannot wait to see how the food industry responds.

Beginning on page 1515, the bill also mandates calories counts for items in a vending machine operated by anyone who operates 20 or more vending machines. And the nutritional information that's already on the majority of food (chips, cookies, etc.) you can buy from a vending machine isn't sufficient under the House bill. Instead, vending machine operators would be required to post a prominent sign next to each item, readable before a consumer makes a purchase. That is going to be a very expensive hassle for vending machine operators across the country, especially smaller operators.

I'm a bit lost on what American over the age of 14, say, doesn't know that chips from a vending machine are high-calorie items, so why this provision exists in the bill is beyond me--except that I know it's there to serve the true believers in the Nanny State.