When it comes to nutrition labeling, colors may be more helpful to consumers than numbers. In an Australian study, consumers were five times more likely to identify healthy foods when the foods they were looking at had color coded nutrition labels instead of numerical ones.
In the U.S., most packaged foods are required to have labels that numerically list nutrition content. This isn’t true in most of Europe. Under current European law, there is no mandatory nutrition labeling on products unless they make a health claim such as “low fat”, “low sugar” or “good for your heart.” One system that has been proposed is often called the traffic light system. Sodium content would be indicated by a red dot on high sodium foods, a yellow or amber dot on foods with intermediate amounts of sodium, and a green dot on low sodium foods. Stop and go labeling. A product could have separate colored dots for sodium, cholesterol, total fat or even more desirable components, such as vitamins. Some variations even include an additional dot for an overall health rating.
If this type of system were used in the U.S., you wouldn’t have to squint to find out which cans of soup were low in sodium or try to remember if 300 milligrams is high or low; just look for the green dot and avoid the red dot. Of course, color coded labels wouldn’t have to replace numerical ones, they could supplement them.
Bridget Kelly is a nutritionist at the Cancer Council in New South Wales, Australia. Kelly headed a team which studied the effect of food labeling on 790 Australians. The study subjects were shown mock foods which were labeled using two variations of the traffic light system and two variations of a numerical system that listed nutrition content as percentage daily intake (similar to the U.S. percent daily value). Each subject saw only a single type of labeling. The subjects were then asked to pick out the healthier foods. As noted above, they were five times more likely to do this correctly when they saw traffic light labels.
Kelly notes that the traffic light system would be particularly useful to the more socially disadvantaged people: "People who were the most socially disadvantaged, in terms of income and education, were six times less likely to be able to use the percentage daily intake system than the most advantaged."
While traffic light labeling can help people identify healthier food, whether they will go on to buy them is a whole other matter. Further studies are needed to answer this question, Kelly said.
The results of the study were presented at the 17th European Council on Obesity on May 8, 2009. The 2009 Council was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
