[xg15]

OP indeed misunderstood the color coding program by treating it as a knowledge problem. Looks to me like it was much more about "nudging": It's one thing to decide for yourself, in your head, whether to have the tofu bowl or the fries for lunch. It's another to have both next to each other in the cafeteria, one authoritatively labeled with a green, the other with a red dot. Sure you can still choose the fries, but it will feel much more directly like "bad choice" than without the markers.

[chefandy]

The nutritionist probably isn’t an idiot, and didn’t assume the developers lacked the knowledge or intellectual capacity to determine the nutritive and caloric density of food. People choose convenience foods for two reasons: a) they’re usually delicious in the least healthy ways, and b) because they’re convenient. The nutritionist likely understood that people choosing unhealthy convenience foods because they were delicious and didn’t care if they were healthy— such as the author— were going to do that anyway. They were probably trying to even out the cognitive load required to make healthy choices for the people that did want to make better choices but were just grabbing whatever was convenient while running to a meeting or as a quick break without losing their flow and didn’t really have time to think about it.

There might be a knowledge problem here, though: perhaps the author, a bit arrogantly, incorrectly assumed they understood the nutritionist’s ostensibly simple-minded intent and strategy on-sight, and dismissed it out-of-hand instead of considering its utility for differing goals, challenges, and motivations.

[firesteelrain]

It could have been combined with calorie counting and exercise/steps efforts too

[marginalia_nu]

Hasn't the nudging theory been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point?

[mtklein]

It hadn't yet been at the time this program was in practice. I wager the enthusiasm for nudging was probably around its peak at the time we're talking, somewhere early 2010s?