#nutrition In the US, some vending machines, companies and hospitals are using a red, yellow, green color system to try and help steer people toward foods that are more nutritionally balanced. It’s a little less easy to define than the Europeans model of ABCDE. Basically, the goal is to have people choose “green” foods more often and to see “yellow” foods as an “occasional” choice and “red” as a “rare” choice but no one wants to fully define what “occasionally” or “rare” means in terms of absolute frequency. In truth, “red” probably should mean 1x/month at most.