A Better Way to Identify Healthy Food

How can you communicate nutrition information to a public that usually does not know the difference between the major macronutrients (carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins)?

The answer might be to use a system that everyone already understands, traffic lights. Bridget Kelly and colleagues have just published some research (Health Promotion International 2009) looking at how well the public understands nutrition related labelling of food products.  

The traffic light system uses the colours green, amber and red to identify food components that are good, fair, and poor respectively.  An additional traffic light provides the overall health rating of the food.  It seems easy to understand even at a glance.

Kelly and colleagues found that consumers were 3 times more likely to identify healthy foods using the traffic light system as compared to a colour coded Daily Intake label and 5 times more likely when using a monochrome Daily Intake system.

Short story: a simple, broadly understandable system that works.

Nerd alert:  Kelly and colleagues used logistic regression to come to the conclusions given above. Reading through their methods section I can't say I'm totally happy with the technique used to identify model variables for the regression.  They should have used either a more a priori technique or gone with a stepwise logistic regression.  

Photo credit: www.choice.com.au