Could traffic light labeling help you?
At Eatiquette, our focus is on ingredients, labels, and you! We want to provide you with a tool for you to understand how healthy your food is, and how you can make the best choices for your lifestyle.
In the US there is plenty of regulation from the FDA on what can put as a claim on a package when it comes to “low calorie”, “reduced sugar”. However, when it comes to comparing foods and quickly seeing if something is low, medium or high in specific nutrients, we don’t have any standards. In the absence of this so-called traffic light labeling system, we look to other countries and borrow the concept from them.
Traffic-light Food Labeling
Traffic-light labeling is a color-coded, front-of-package approach that immediately communicates the nutritional quality of the food to the consumer. Variations of this tool are used everywhere, from the UK to Ecuador. In the UK specifically, the traffic-light labeling system focuses on fat, saturated fat, sugars, and salt; ingredients known to increase the risk of chronic, non-communicable diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
What Do Food Traffic-light Labels Look Like?
Here are a couple of examples of the traffic-light labeling system.
Image credit: https://www.food.gov.uk
Image credit: Global Food Research Program
How healthy is my food? Making Quick Decisions
Green means the food is LOW in fat, saturated fat, sugars, or salt. So just like traffic signals, green means “go” – go ahead, it’s healthy!
Yellow/amber means the food is MEDIUM in fat, saturated fat, sugars, or salt. If a label is mostly yellow/amber, then you can eat it most of the time.
Red means the food is HIGH in fat, saturated fat, sugars, or salt. And just like traffic signals, red means “stop” – limit your eating. Think of items like pastries and cookies that we love to eat, be it in moderation.
Eatiquette & Traffic-light Labeling
The Eatiquette app also uses this type of traffic-light labeling system. In the absence of an established US traffic-light labeling system, our Eatiquette experts use benchmarks from the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the World Health Organization. For Calories, we used the benchmark numbers from the Volumetrics eating plan by B. Rolls for now, but we are also considering the use of the Health Star Rating system used in Australia. We have yet to find good benchmarks for sodium by weight, so for now we simply use product comparisons among our comprehensive database. For protein and the number of ingredients, we have decided not to use traffic light symbolization for the time being.
Check Your Sodium Intake in the App
Let’s use sodium as an example in the Eatiquette app. To determine the color code for sodium in the products in our database, we determined the traffic-light colors by comparing all products. The bottom one-third is determined low (green), the top one-third is high (red), and everything in between is medium (yellow/amber). When new research or regulation comes out regarding indicative nutrient levels of what should be eaten freely (green), with caution (yellow), or sparingly (red), we will adjust the color-coding in our app’s database.
Check out these two screenshots from my personalized Eatiquette app. Increasing fiber is vital to me, so I checked out Kellogg’s All-Bran Cereal Buds. While it is high in fiber (36.7%), it is also high in sugar and salt (both highlighted in red).
But the Kashi Golean Cereal not only has a lot of fiber (22.4%), but it is also medium in sugar and salt content (both highlighted in yellow). After using the Eatiquette app to make comparisons, I can see the Kashi cereal is best suited to my dietary needs!
As most processed foods are high in sodium, you are likely to consume too much sodium even if you stay in the medium range. While we were writing this post, the WHO published a report on benchmarking sodium levels in food. We are sure to read this carefully and consider the levels recommended therein into our benchmarks.
The Traffic-light Conversation
The traffic-light labeling system intends to help people make healthy food choices quickly. However, there is discussion in the nutrition community over how worthwhile the system is.
One study researched traffic-light labeling on 5,695 employees in a Boston area hospital. At the end of the study, the researchers found that employees increased their consumption of green-labeled healthy foods and reduced their consumption of red-labeled unhealthy foods by 23%. Those are promising results!
However, in January 2020, the Washington Post published an article that discussed the criticisms of the system. Objections ranged from an increased risk of eating disorders in susceptible populations to concerns about attributing judgment values to food.
We’d love to see cooperative partnerships among the food industry, registered dietitians, consumers, and other private entities like Eatiquette. Together we can bring transparency and clarity to the daily process of food choice. So open up your Eatiquette app, and Let’s Go!
