Great Idea: A Better Food Label Increases Awareness and Improves Nutrition

As a food labeling system, a color-coded “traffic light” system is superior to currently used percentage daily intake systems in helping consumers identify healthy foods, according to a new study.

Some governments are trying to improve the quality of nutrition information that consumers have access to in supermarkets by adding labels to the front of food packages, but there is no standard approach, not all products have labels and in many countries several different systems are used.

With percentage daily intake systems, the labeling is often just one color and shows what proportion of the government recommended adult daily intake the key nutrients in the product provide. With the traffic light system, by contrast, a color dot is used to rate the overall or specific nutrient content of a product.

“Food manufacturers are currently allowed to use any labeling system they prefer on the front of food packages. In some countries this has led to a plethora of different systems appearing on supermarket shelves, which only serves to confuse consumers more and does not allow them to quickly and accurately identify healthy products,” said Bridget Kelly, a nutritionist at the Cancer Council, in New South Wales in Australia.

“The food industry tends to favor the percentage daily intake method (known as Guideline Daily Amount in some countries), but our research indicates that the traffic light system is the most effective and that a consistent labeling approach across all food products is needed. This is unlikely to be achieved without government regulation,”  Kelly added.  The researchers conducted a study to determine the most acceptable and effective foodlabeling system for consumers.

Four different approaches were tested on 790 Australians to determine their preferences and ability to compare the healthiness of mock food products, using two variations of the traffic light system and two variations of the percentage daily intake system.

Each person was exposed to only one type of nutrition label, allowing each system to be evaluated on its own merits without the influence of the others. The results showed that consumers favored a consistent labeling format across all products.

Also, those who were shown the traffic light labels were five times more likely to identify healthier foods than those shown a single color version of the percentage daily intake label and three times more likely to do so than those shown a color-coded version of the daily intake label.

“While all consumers could use the traffic light system to pick healthier foods, the percentage daily intake system could only be used by the most socially advantaged people,” she noted. “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.”

The study was presented at the European Congress on Obesity, May 2009.