I was at the mall the other day and my wife and I were looking for some kind of treat or snack. As we wandered around, I was looking up at the menus and realized just how much I am going to miss something specific about Ontario.

You see, Ontario has this wonderful law that requires every restaurant or food service establishment that has more than 20 locations in the entire province to post the calorie content of every item directly onto the menu. That way, you can make a properly informed choice when eating out.

Quoted from Ontario.ca

Making informed choices

Nutritional information, including calories, is already available on the labels of many items we buy at the grocery store.

Of course, we also buy food when we’re out and about. That’s why information about calories is now available on menus in restaurants and other food service businesses.

This is part of the Healthy Menu Choices Act. As of January 1, 2017, all food-service chains with 20 or more locations in Ontario must post the number of calories in the food and drink items they sell.

This law has made my life so much easier, and it has aided tremendously when eating out. Even though I am a professional cook and I have an idea of what goes into food, you can never be completely certain unless you have access to nutritional information for every product that is used in the process.

When I know how many calories I have already eaten during the day, or what I am going to have later, it makes my life so much easier to just look at the menu and plan accordingly. I like having an exact knowledge of what I can have without unknowingly overeating.

Recently, Health Canada has announced that they plan on adding new labels to every product on grocery store shelves that is high in salt, sugar, fat, etc. Let me say, I am completely supportive of this initiative. I love our country for it’s views on healthy living and the requirements that we place on food manufacturers and restaurants/fast food establishments.

We still have a long way to go, especially as we look at certain differences between the provinces, but I sincerely hope that the rest of the country adopts Ontario’s standard of forcing chain restaurants to display calorie counts on their menus. I think it would make us as a society a little more aware of the things we eat, and perhaps it may aid in preventing overeating, especially on things like sugary, dairy filled coffee drinks that people consume multiple times a day.

I think this is one of my favourite things about Ontario. Considering the bulk of my weight loss has occurred here, it has provided some really good assistance in helping me develop healthy eating habits, learning what’s really in certain food items when I go out to eat, and will easily have an impact on the rest of my life.