Professor Partha Deb and Hunter MA Student Carmen Vargas: Calorie Counts Really Do Fight Obesity
Professor Partha Deb, of the Economics Department, working with Hunter MA student Carmen Vargas, recently published a research paper entitled 'Who Benefits from Calorie Labeling? An Analysis of its Effects on Body Mass,' on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) website. The paper was reviewed in BloombergView by Cass Sunstein, who called it "a terrific story: the people who need to lose weight are losing weight, and the people who are least likely to know about caloric content are learning about it."
Sunstein, a former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, called the empirical strategy employed by Deb and Vargas "ingenious." Articles on the research also appeared in the Philly.com newspaperhttp://www.phillyvoice.com/calorie-labeling-more-useful-people-think-says-study/ and on the Chicago Tribune website http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-calorie-labels-obesity-overweight-americans-20160223-story.html