The prevalence of chronic diseases and major disease risk factors at different ages among 150 000 men and women living in Mexico City: cross-sectional analyses of a prospective study

Abstract

Background: While most of the global burden from chronic diseases, and especially vascular diseases, is now borne by low and middle-income countries, few large-scale epidemiological studies of chronic diseases in such countries have been performed.

Front of pack labels enhance attention to nutrition information in novel and commercial brands

“…comparative tasks in the same format) also seem to be most effective at drawing attention to itself, an early stage of information processing. In short, the label that we find to garner the most attention, a color-coded FOP, is also the label that researchers who have focused on the late stages of cognitive processing (comprehension) have also found to be easiest to comprehend and use 26, 31–35 . The combination of our results with those on comprehension suggests that color coded FOPs are more effectively processed at multiple stages of information processing (see Table 1), and thus is likely to be a more effective method of nutrition labeling.…”

“…Researchers from the UK 71 , concluded that color-coded FOPs (traffic lighting) significantly enhanced participants’ abilities to arrive at a judgement regarding product “healthfulness.” This finding was echoed by a study conducted in Germany in which a color-coded FOP enhanced the chances of making a correct evaluation of the healthier choice of product during a binary force choice task compared to other types of nutrition labels. 26 Likewise, Australian researchers concluded that people were five times more likely to correctly identify a food as healthy when labeled with a traffic light FOP than a monochromatic FOP scheme. 32 …”

“…Lab-based research on the ability of FOPs to alter the decision stage have yielded conflicting results, with some providing no evidence that FOPs influence choice 26, 72, 73 and others reporting that they can 43, 74, 75 . Applied research conducted in the US has suggested that the use of a simple, self-developed, color-coded labeling system which distilled several nutrition factors into a single red, yellow or green label 76 did not merely assist in understanding of comparative healthfulness, but that it also positively impacted selection behavior.…”

“…This type of comprehension work is important; a label must be comprehensible to be effective. By and large, these studies suggest that color-coded multiple traffic light systems are easily understood 26, 31–35 . However, since these studies give people a nutrition-relevant goal, they by-pass the early attentional stage of the processing model, which limits this research to people who already have the goal of assessing nutritional information.…”

“…First, the varied formats can be confusing, 9 making it “difficult for consumers to evaluate and compare the nutritional profiles of foods.” 25 Second, the lack of a standardized approach to FOP nutrition labeling can be misleading to consumers due to the potential for selective reporting and manipulation of information 25 . Consumers have reported confusion with having to contend with multiple FOP label formats in various countries, including: Germany 26 , Australia 23, 27 and the US 25 .…”