I have a plan to get America into shape. We have been bombarded recently with how fat Americans are getting and there are tons of programs offered to help you slim down. If this is truly a serious problem, however, I have the perfect solution. There should be a law that the name of every food item, whether in a grocery store or a restaurant, must begin with the amount of calories that are in it.

Think of the impact. Imagine standing in a fastfood restaurant and trying to decide between the 350 calorie milk shake or the 600 calorie version. No more biggie sizing. You would be asked if you wanted the "500 more calories Biggie size". Wouldn't we make better choices if we had to choose between the 450 calorie cheeseburger and the 800 calorie deluxe burger? At the grocery store you could choose between the 400 calorie chicken or the 5 million calorie batter dipped chicken.

One draw back would be finding enough space to put all the zeroes one would find in the snack aisle. Grocers may need to start putting a bag of chips next to carrot sticks to make sure there was enough room for the signage. In fact some fast food joints might go right out of business once customers learned how many calories were truly in the food.