Ontario’s provincial gambling monopoly has tested ‘calorie labels’ on its casinos’ slot machines as a way to help consumers be aware of exactly what it is they’re consuming.

On Tuesday, the Waterloo Region Record reported on two University of Waterloo (UW) professors who created the equivalent of nutritional labeling for slot machines to educate gamblers on how the machines worked and hopefully reduce the prevalence of problem gambling behavior.

UW professor Kevin Harrigan says his mission is to “spread the word about how [slot machines] were designed,” in particular their use of lights and sounds to disguise losing spins as wins, as well as the increased use of the ‘near-miss’ phenomenon, in which the bars or icons almost line up to form a jackpot but not quite, leaving some players thinking they’re more likely to win on subsequent spins.

Working with his UW colleague Dan Brown, Harrigan created a slots version of the ‘Facts Up Front’ nutritional labels that offer US consumers the unvarnished truth of how much salt, sugar and fat they’re consuming.