Now, online meal-ordering platforms can lead the way in the war against obesity by using traffic light nutrition label system, according to a recent study.
The University of Pennsylvania research suggested that while ordering lunch from your favourite online delivery spot, you might switch to a lower-calorie option on noticing a red stop light, signifying high calorie content, next to the club sandwich.
When researchers added colour-coded or numeric calorie labels to online food ordering systems, the total calories ordered was reduced by about 10 percent when compared to menus featuring no calorie information at all.
The study is the first to evaluate the effect of "traffic-light" calorie labeling - where green labels signal low calorie content, yellow labels signal medium calorie content, and red labels signal high calorie content - in the increasingly common setting of ordering meals online.
"Calorie labeling appears to be effective in an online environment where consumers have fewer distractions, and the simpler traffic-light labeling seems as effective as standard calorie numbers," said lead author Eric M. VanEpps.
For the study, VanEpps and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University set up a system in which corporate employees ordering lunch from a cafeteria via a newly-developed online portal were presented with the calorie information for menu items via numeric or traffic light calorie labels, both together, or none at all. Over the six week study period, 803 orders were placed by the 249 study participants.
The team found that each of the three calorie labeling conditions, numbers alone, traffic lights alone, or both labels together, reduced calories ordered by about 10 percent, compared to orders involving no calorie labels.
"The similar effects of traffic light and numeric labeling suggests to us that consumers are making decisions based more on which choices seem healthier than on absolute calorie numbers," VanEpps said.
The study is published online in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.
