Food for thought
Using bar graphs on nutrition labels captures customers’ attention quicker and allows them to make a speedier evaluation of a food’s healthiness, potentially helping to tackle obesity and other diet-related conditions, researchers found.
The study discovered buyers can make quicker and more informed choices about their food if nutrition fact labels (NFLs) are in graph form. The team from Shaanxi Normal University, in Xi’an, China, also found brief education about nutrition can improve attention to and understanding of its benefits.
Researchers Zhibing Gao, Ziang Li, Xiangling Zhuang and Guojie Ma pointed to World Health Organization statistics showing the daily calorific value of food intake has increased by 580 kilocalories in the past 30–40 years and that the amount of food intake is increasing every year. However, they said NFLs have been criticised for their poor visualisation and low efficiency. While they were updated as recently as 2016 in the US, NFLs have not changed significantly in China for the past 30 years.
The team redesigned back-of-package NFLs to display both black and coloured bar graphs showing nutrient reference values. Two eye movement studies were performed to evaluate the ergonomic advantages of the graphical NFLs.
Their report, published in the journal Ergonomics, said: “Compared with traditional NFLs, graphical NFLs were superior in capturing consumer attention and speeding up their healthiness evaluation. It also potentially led to the selection of healthier foods, as evidenced by a comparatively lower healthiness evaluation for unhealthy foods. Therefore, graphical bars would be a beneficial addition to traditional nutrition facts panels and would serve as an impetus for policymakers to support the informed and healthy food choices of consumers.”
