To help people choose healthier meals, some cafeterias are using “traffic light” labels on their food, writes Tove Danovich at Civil Eats. At Massachusetts General Hospital, which adopted the approach in 2009, sales of sodas and other beverages marked “red” fell significantly in two years. Sales of “green” foods went up. The system uses green for the healthiest foods, yellow for less healthy and red for items with little nutritional value. “The labels are a great way to communicate,” a hospital official told Civil Eats, which describes adoption of the plan by schools and employers such as Google.
“Guiding eaters toward healthier options without promoting obsessive eating behavior has been a concern of many labeling systems,” writes Danovich. Creators of labeling systems take care in their descriptions of what the color code means to avoid stigmatizing foods or the people who eat them. Neither the government nor the U.S. food industry is inclined to use the traffic-light approach.