Could exercise calorie labels make food less tempting?

This was in the news yesterday. “How long it takes to work off the calories” warning on food packaging might make you think twice about eating unhealthy food.

I’m not really interested in exercise advice or warning as I do it 5 days a week and eat/drink sensibly (half of the time). It’s more complicated than calories consume and calories burn off theory. I’m most interested in the unnecessary crap in the food and the stuff they don’t want you to know.

I’m more interested in food labeling being simplified in this respect than complicating the matter. Simple such as “traffic light” labels.

There were discussions about the “traffic light” system over here but they didn’t go anywhere in the end.

To me this over simplifies things and could be confusing. Not all bowls of cereal are made equal and I’m curious on the research behind the concept. A bowl of fruit loops vs grape nuts is totally different.

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But you don’t need to exercise to burn calories. You just need to breathe, have your heart move your blood around, and maintain a body temperature of 98.6. So it’s a little misleading. How long do you need to sleep to burn off a sandwich, I wonder?

I searched for “human resting calorie use”, and the consensus was 1400-1900 (US) calories per day. Pick 1500, because you don’t move much when sleeping, divide by 24 hours, and you get about 62 calories/hour. A Popeye’s chicken sandwich is 690 calories. So, sleeping for about 11 hours should take care of it, depending on your metabolism.

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