Policy makers around the world are facing serious challenges in controlling citizens' obesity and healthiness, hence, they devote increased attention to the development of tools that communicate easily processable nutrition information. Front-of-package nutrition labels are one of such tools and have been used to signal the extent to which food items contain potentially unhealthy ingredients such as sugar or fat. In this research, we focus on sugar cues on three different food categories to investigate their impact on consumer choice. We compare two labels, one already used (traffic-light) and one never used (sugar teaspoon): sugar teaspoons prove to be more effective than the previously used traffic-lights in healthy product choices, but only for specific food categories. In two experiments, we find that sugar teaspoon labels indicating sugar content, as opposed to traffic-light labels, are more effective in signaling sugar levels and thus, in helping consumers making healthier choices. We find that this is particularly relevant for food categories that have a simpler ingredient composition (i.e., whose healthiness relies more heavily on sugar). We finally propose processing fluency as the mechanism for the relation between sugar signals and product choices.

中文翻译：

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包装正面营养标签对低糖产品选择的影响

世界各地的政策制定者在控制公民的肥胖和健康方面都面临着严峻的挑战，因此，他们越来越关注开发能够传达易于处理的营养信息的工具。包装正面营养标签是此类工具之一，已被用于表明食品含有糖或脂肪等潜在不健康成分的程度。在这项研究中，我们关注三种不同食物类别的糖分线索，以调查它们对消费者选择的影响。我们比较了两个标签，一个已经使用过（红绿灯）和一个从未使用过（糖茶匙）：糖茶匙在健康产品选择中被证明比以前使用的红绿灯更有效，但仅适用于特定的食品类别。在两次实验中，我们发现，与红绿灯标签相比，指示糖含量的糖茶匙标签更有效地表明糖水平，从而帮助消费者做出更健康的选择。我们发现这与成分组成更简单的食品类别（即其健康更依赖于糖）特别相关。我们最终提出加工流畅性作为糖信号与产品选择之间关系的机制。