Manfred,
this is interesting and surprising to me at the same time, since it seems to be contradicting what I learnt many years ago when studying Remote Sensing and Satellite Images Interpretation: in Remote Sensing it's commonly accepted, for environmental studies, the use of false color RGB images, where the Near Infrared channel (the most important for detection of healthy vegetation) is arbitrarily represented with the red channel. This was justified with the fact that the human eye is more sentitive to slight variations in this color than in green and blue.
I'll have to investigate more on this
Thanks
Giacomo