Brett Guthrie: “Again, let me state what this bill is not. It is not doing away with the calorie count or the ability for people to…”

“Again, let me state what this bill is not. It is not doing away with the calorie count or the ability for people to understand what calorie content, or caloric content, is available in each product. I am one who looks at that. I don't know of anything that has a calorie count on anything that I have eaten recently that I haven't looked at. I have checked out the serving sizes so that I know how many chicken wings I want to order. If I can get the calories per chicken wing, I can make that determination. We looked at the menu board that was offered earlier, and it looked simple, but this is the issue: Even if you put ranges, how do you get the information in people's hands? I was just at a restaurant, when I was traveling in my district the other day, that had calories for different orders. One was from 400 to 800 on one. So what we want to do is to make it available in a way that is efficient, as most people now get their information not necessarily on a board where you have to have big ranges, but specific. For instance, at one pizza restaurant alone, we had the pizza slice plus a few toppings; but what if you have five styles of crust, six different cheeses, five sauces, four sizes, and 20 different toppings? If you put all of that together, it comes to about 34 million different combinations, and deviations from the standard that the FDA has put forward could lead to fines and to criminal penalties.…”