About 18 months ago, New York City began requiring chain restaurants to post the number of calories in their food items on the menu board, near the price. The thinking was that the numbers would prompt healthier choices, and several cities and states joined the effort.

Two surveys about New Yorkers show striking results. Independent researchers, led by Brian Elbel, an assistant professor of medicine and health policy at New York University School of Medicine, concluded the law had no effect on the number of calories consumed in lower-income, minority neighborhoods, according to The New York Times.

The city revealed its findings at the annual meeting of The Obesity Society: City dwellers ordered items with fewer calories at four chains—Au Bon Pain, KFC, McDonald’s and Starbucks. The calorie drops were 152 at hamburger chains, 73 at sandwich chains and 23 at coffee shops.

In other words, not much changed; the thousands of New Yorkers surveyed apparently didn't care enough to fib about embracing a newfound caloric creed.

The NYU study, reported in Health Affairs, found that “27.7 percent who saw calorie labeling in New York said the information influenced their choices.” Yet, “We did not detect a change in calories purchased.”

The city’s health department survey found that in most chains, diners’ orders hardly changed the number of calories they consumed, but the calorie numbers in coffee shops dropped nearly 10 percent—56 percent of the patrons noticed the information, and 15 percent took the numbers to heart, for an average drop of 106 calories, even though many said they did not notice the information.

Do you want a pie chart with that? Just gestimates.

Conclusions:

     • New York City was not “expecting miracles” said Dr. Lynn Silver, an assistant commissioner in the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “Dietary changes come slowly.”

     • The NYU researchers noted that obesity rates tend to be higher in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, and, “This is where we would have liked to see an impact most,” Dr. Elbel said. They recommend more research.

     • Most New Yorkers seem unmoved.

     • Most cynically: Why spend all that money—passing the law, redoing the menu boards, monitoring compliance and conducting surveys, writing about and presenting the results—for this?

Everybody knows all about exercise— the who, what, when, where and why—thanks to the public education campaigns of the last 14 years.

Well, only one-third of Americans absorbed the facts, according to Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Two-thirds of Americans have been bypassed by the “highly generalized, saturating effect of media in the current environment,” researchers wrote. “Through varied sources, many are bombarded with multiple physical activity and general health promotion ‘recommendations’ that may be challenging to differentiate.”

That is just one of many news bits about exercise. We’re here to be saturated with “recommendations” so you won’t have to. Here are the latest facts about exercise:

The campy ’60s sitcom “Green Acres” was brilliant television imitating life: “Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.” Even for those who “get allergic smelling hay,” a connection with the natural world not only promotes better physical health, but leads to much better mental health than people who claim “New York is where I’d rather stay.”

A study in the Netherlands found that green space had a huge impact on mental health, and a study in Tokyo concluded that senior citizens who lived near green spaces where they could walk lived longer than their concrete-bound peers. Both studies were reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community.

A troubling controversy has been stirred up again, threatening to spoil the World Series, showcase of Major League Baseball—a curveball doesn’t curve. It only looks that way because of a batter’s vision and perception.

Zhong-Lin Lu, a neurologist at USC, is the latest participant in the fray, saying that the ball hardly moves at all … but the batter perceives it as dropping  precipitously. Lu is a specialist in visual motion and perception.

In 1976, I was loving my striped bell-bottoms, groovy grown-up platforms (inherited from an older cousin—sweet!), the Bicentennial, and, um, swine flu.

I  know. Who could love the disease outbreak that wasn’t, generally considered a public-health fiasco? (You know, 30 to 40 million people vaccinated, no real flu in sight, and some dangerous vaccine side effects.)

Well, I did. I loved swine flu. Being 10 years old, I really didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on, and I visualized something vaguely pig-related when the topic came up. (Other news events of the time were similarly fuzzy; for example, Watergate had a Niagara Falls-ish look in my mind.)