You enjoy going out to eat supper with your family. With your husband so often working overtime, the kids involved in so many sports, and you fulfilling the commitments that come with being a wife and a mom as well as trying to carve out at least a little time to work out going out for supper strikes you as the only time the entire family eats together.

But your workouts have fallen by the wayside and those jeans that used to be oh-so comfortable are suddenly oh-so tight. So you go online and find those chicken tenders you always order at Applebee's eating chicken has to be better than eating a burger and fries, right? are 1,110 calories 587 of which are pure fat.You would've never guessed that your favorite entree at a sit-down restaurant would be just 10 calories less than two yes, two Big Macs.That's exactly, I guess, what the government was thinking and why you'll no longer need to research such matters online come next November.By that time all restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops, most bakeries, and a few other venues that sell food at 20 or more locations will be required by law to list nutritional information on menus.Another guess of mine is that most people don't want to consider calories when they go out to eat. But in the last 30 years or so the rate of going out to eat has increased dramatically and so has obesity.To some degree, the two are linked. As a result, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration created this new rule last November.Unfortunately, I doubt that the change will really impact adults. Too many of my generation and those before mine associate eating out with treating yourself.I fondly remember, for example, a time in junior high when my family was frequenting a fire company's kitchen, and I was ordering not only a roast beef sandwich swimming in a sludge-like gravy but also an oversized cheeseburger. Both came with French fries and I would eat every single fry.This dietary disaster probably didn't hurt me too much because I'd usually run home to go dining from playing pick-up basketball, and usually I'd run back to the courts as soon as we returned home. Not to mention that my family could only afford to go out to eat every other Friday, dad's payday.Back then I had virtually no interest in health and nutrition, but I do know that I wouldn't have ordered all that if I would've seen the tally of calories and fat and had been going there three times a week instead of twice a month.That's because I saw myself as an athlete, and though I couldn't have verbalized it very well, I knew that there was a correlation between what you ate and how you performed.Although most youngsters today probably don't possess my teenage passion for sports, teens and preteens today definitely want to look a certain way. And in that same murky way that I knew what I ate was linked to how I played, they know what they eat affects their shape.So having teens read nutritional information before ordering food can't be a bad thing especially in lieu of some recent studies on the deleterious effects of obesity.A study published in Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology last December, for instance, estimated that life expectancy is reduced by 8 years in those determined to be obese. Possibly worse is that the loss of what researchers dubbed "healthy-life years" can be reduced by up to 19 in the obese if they develop type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease.But children don't have to wait until they've aged to experience the adverse effects of fast food. A study performed by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Texas encompassing the performance of more than 8,500 students as fifth and then eighth graders found "deleterious academic outcomes" to eating fast food.How deleterious?Those who ate fast food daily scored significantly lower on standardized reading, math, and science tests even after variables such as the amount of physical activity, the amount of television viewing, and the student's socioeconomic situation were eliminated from the equation.Whether the consumption of the fast food leads to a nutrient deficiency that produces the poor results or if the poor results are a result of the high fat and sugar consumption reducing both attention and reaction times, the researchers cannot say for certain.Since our society will probably never go back to a time when most of the family meals are cooked at home by mom, letting consumers know especially kids what's in the foods consumed elsewhere should improve the collective health of America.Even though the initial cost of such an endeavor may immediately hurt companies financially, any measure that improves national health should eventually do the same for the economy.