Does green mean healthy? Nutrition label color affects perceptions of healthfulness
Schuldt tested whether the colour of a calorie label changes how healthy a food seems. In the first experiment, university students imagined being hungry in a grocery checkout line and saw a candy bar with either a red or a green calorie label. The calorie count was the same. The bar under the green label was rated healthier. In a second experiment, online participants saw candy with a green or a white label and rated how much healthy eating mattered to their food choices. The more a person valued healthy eating, the less healthful the white-labelled bar looked to them, and the green label removed that pattern. Schuldt described the green label as a buffer for foods of relatively poor nutrition. The coloured item was a label that carried information, not a whole package, and a green-versus-red contrast cannot say how much of the gap belongs to each colour.
Schuldt tested whether the colour of a calorie label changes how healthy a food seems. In the first experiment, university students imagined being hungry in a grocery checkout line and saw a candy bar with either a red or a green calorie label. The calorie count was the same. The bar under the green label was rated healthier. In a second experiment, online participants saw candy with a green or a white label and rated how much healthy eating mattered to their food choices. The more a person valued healthy eating, the less healthful the white-labelled bar looked to them, and the green label removed that pattern. Schuldt described the green label as a buffer for foods of relatively poor nutrition. The coloured item was a label that carried information, not a whole package, and a green-versus-red contrast cannot say how much of the gap belongs to each colour.
Written from the cornell University's news release on the paper, because the abstract page could not be reached.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
doi:10.1080/10410236.2012.725270. Sample sizes (93 and 39) are from Cornell University's news release, news.cornell.edu/node/279365.