AGING IS CHANGING BY CANDY CIMA
FEBRUARY 2024
The App I Didn’t Know I couldn’t Live Without
What if you could know any ingredient in a food and know if the food is good or bad for you just by holding it up to your phone. There actually is an App called Yuka that does just that! Designed by brothers Julie Chaplin, Francois Martin and Benoit Martin became a phenomenon in France. Now it is available in the States and I for one could not be happier. So how does
it work? It has no learning curve and within five minutes I was happily scanning items before I put them in my cart. You simply click on Scan in the app and aim your phone at the bar code on any product. Yuka then gives the product a rating with a score from 0 to 100 with a summary of the product’s negatives and positives. Yuka also rates products
simply as Excellent, Good, Poor and Bad. But it doesn’t stop there it tells you why. It will tell you about any additives, high fat, sugar, sodium fiber and more in a very easy to read visual. Even the free version of the App will auto generate alternatives to whichever scanned products didn’t make the grade! Everything you scan is permanently accessible under the History tab. I have never had so much fun in the grocery store! The really interesting thing is that many items I was buying because I thought they were
healthy choices were bad for me actually got an excellent rating. Like these Cape Cod Kettle Potato Chips which got an excellent rating when many other chips advertised as a healthy choice were rated Poor. I like that Yuka tells you what ingredients might be a problem allowing you to decide how that affects you as an individual. For instance, if you scan a product and it says it has a high sodium content and you are someone who does not have a problem with sodium you can choose to select that product anyway but at least you are making an informed choice. Additives so often have unfamiliar names that even though I am a label reader so many of the terms used for additives are unfamiliar to me. This App takes away all the
confusion and cut right to the problem ones and tells you why. Here is what the National Institute of Health says about the Yuka App. “Nutrition-related smartphone apps have also gained popularity 39. These apps serve a multitude of functions, from helping users to track their weight and calorie intake, to offering nutritional advice, to aiding shoppers in the interpretation of food labels 39–42.” The French app ‘Yuka’ enables users to scan product barcodes and see a consumer-friendly interpretation of the information (i.e., nutrition quality, manufacturing methods, and alerts to the presence of potentially harmful additives), and to compare product nformation side by side.” The Yuka App even does cosmetics! It really has turned out to be the App I cannot live without. Shopping has never been so much fun. Now all I need is an App that will tell me way I should or should not buy that Dress!