Logo in red

So while driving home yesterday, I noticed something that must have been going on for years, but I just caught up with. The fiery red-and-yellow logo with the big M arches in the middle has somehow become a drab-greenish-brown-and-yellow logo (talking about the little signs attatched to the streetlights, btw, not about the logo on their buildings). What's up with that? I know Ronald changed his "restaurants" so that they look more appealing to people over the age of 8, but I thought the logo had remained the same. Why change from red to camouflage colours? So I started musing on that typical red that you find in so many highly successful brands, from Coca-Cola to Marlboro to the lettering on Mars bars, which you can also find in Red Bull, Vodafone, Nike, Canon, H&M... The list is endless, really. Almost all have that same reddish colour, which struck me as odd, because if you want to pick something special to stand out, why pick the same colour everyone else has?
In short, what is it with red that makes it popular? Is it the association you guys (by which I literally mean "you guys", as in men, not "you meat-eaters") have with meat and "the hunt" and showing your strength and stuff, while we women quietly gather our berries, as influenced by the hunter-gatherer psychology that is so popular nowadays (and so very flawed, being thought up post-WWII to get women back into the kitchen, but let's not go there now)? Is it because it is associated with passion and love and lust? Is it... well, for me the list kinda ended there, because I am not a big fan of red (not that I mind it, but it just doesn't make me super-happy), so I went to investigate.
I found this article on a website called "logo critiques", which is mainly aimed towards helping people create better logos (most of the logo websites I found were, for some strange reason. Is the whole "competition" part of capitalism not popular anymore?). Here (and on several other sites, I'll let you look for yourself) it says that red is associated with most of the things I mentioned above, and that it is an "intense colour". It is used a lot because it grips the viewer's attention and "has been known to raise one's blood pressure or make people hungry". Right then. They give Red Bull as an example, which is one of the few brands I can think of that actually fits their description (being associated with both energy and food). I couldn't see it working out for most of the others, I mean; McDonald's would want people to be hungry, but not agressive or horny, surely? And for H&M or Vodafone, wouldn't it be kinda difficult if their customers saw their logo and though "now I'm hungry, let's go eat" and just walk by? What about the agression and crime rate, do they go up in streets with a lot of red-logo shops next to each other? And really, does this mean that the whole obesitas epidemic can be blamed on too many red logo's?
Joking aside, there are some good reasons why McD would change from red to greenish, because (the article says) green is associated with "life and renewal" and often used to come across as eco-friendly (they are also mentioned as a good example of the use of yellow, which is the more important colour in their logo, but not if you change the other colour, because then you draw attention to it). They try to change their image, so good choice there, and they attempt at being more eco-friendly with their whole "no palm oil" business, so I can see how they arrived at this. But the "green" they picked is not so much green as military, which is associated with war, strenght, fighting, etc. So they took away red because of some of the associations (passion, agression) were unwanted and choose a colour that has none of their desired associations (food, hungry, meat), but all of the unwanted ones (agression, war)? Now I'm really confused.
Perhaps best to leave these things to those people who are being paid a lot of money to think about them. If it's all meant to be subliminal we're not supposed to think about it anyway, but to just see something red and go "Now I'm hungry/horny/hateful, let's buy some stuff!"