About 56 percent of New York City population is overweight or obese, according to city health officials. New York City municipality reinforced the measure for chained restaurants to write on their menus or menus boards calorie information.

According to this new regulation all New York City restaurants that have more than 15 outlets in the city or across the country will have to post the calorie counts as prominently as the price of each menu item. This regulation will affect about 10 percent of the city’s 23,000 restaurants, which serve about the third of all the food eaten outside the home each year.

City’s health officials believe that New York citizens having access to calorie information will use it and change their orders because of that, and this could be a start to reduce obesity and, with it, diabetes. Dr. Thomas Frieden, the city’s health commissioner emphasized: "There is a clear link between chain restaurants, particularly fast food, and obesity".

The New York Bloomberg administration started to impose menu requirements on chain restaurants since last December, as part of several health related reforms, including the ban of smoking in public places.

Chuk Hunt, a spokesman for the restaurant association said the group apposes the Bloomberg Administration ruling proposal and added: “This is a case of government imposing itself upon the way businesses are conducted”. The association believes that this new regulation will cost extra individual franchise owners who will have to pay for the revised menu boards. The group also stated that simply posting calories on a menu will not help consumers when choosing their diet. Restaurants, on their web sites, posters and other methods offer broader nutritional information about their dishes, including gram totals for fats, sugars and carbohydrates.

A health department survey showed that much lesser customers saw the calorie information on the restaurants web sites or other locations, than in the cases of restaurants which had posted this information next to the cash register.

Dr. Frieden said: “Even if it’s only 10 percent or 20 percent of people who change their behavior, that’s a lot.”