Fooducate: A Brilliant Professor of All Things Edible
How well do you know your food? If you really want to know what goes into it, how nutritious it is, and what might make a more sensible substitute, Fooducate will give you a full dossier just by snapping a picture of the label. It might not always be the bearer of good news, but Fooducate will leave you more informed about what you're putting into your body.
After scanning the barcodes of various packaged food products with an app called Fooducate, it doesn't take long to understand one thing: Almost any food that comes in a sealed wrapper has a bunch of chemicals squirted into it or has been funkily modified so that it only barely resembles healthy food.
I think most moderately health-conscious people have heard the basics of this information before: Packaged food is bad, usually made with things like high fructose corn syrup (HFCP!), trans fats, various additives, preservatives and food colorings. At best, many (most?) packaged foods spike your blood sugar and mess with your insulin response, load you up with too many calories for the nutritional value the food brings to your body, and possibly leave you hungrier than when you started.
That last statement might be an urban myth, but there's a brand of highly manufactured cherry pies that come in individually wrapped packages that I might be addicted to. One box gives you six little pies, all for under $2. Basically, I can chow through six pies, consume more calories than I should should need for most of the day, and end up feeling like I haven't eaten anything at all. I know they are bad for me, and I don't need an app like Fooducate to tell me they get a grade of "D."
Then Again, I Had No Idea So Many Foods Still Contain Trans Fats
Take, for instance, a box of Keebler Club Cracker Minis that I pulled out of my cupboard. The Fooducate app rates them a C+, which means they are a little better than average. Still, Fooducate points out that they contain trans fats and are made with refined flours, not whole grain. What's this mean?
Tap the warning in the Fooducate app, and it says that consumption of trans-fat has "unequivocally been shown to increase the risk of heart disease by raising levels of LDL (bad cholesterol), and lowering levels of HDL (good cholesterol)." If you want more detail about the ingredients, Fooducate provides a link that seems to launch an in-app browser that points to a relevant page on the Fooducate website blog.
In addition to trans fat, there's a warning that the crackers contain a controversial additive, "TBHQ," also known as tertiary butylhydroquinone. While it's not in the dictionary or spell checker on my MacBook, Fooducate says it's a petroleum derivative that's used in small amounts to keep oils in food from going rancid. As much as a thirtieth of an ounce, apparently, can cause nausea, delirium, and ringing of the ears.
What have I learned here? I'm reminded that there's a lot of crud mixed into our packaged food supply. At the same time, I appreciate the fact that I can buy a bag of chips or a box of crackers and not worry that it's spoiled on the way from the manufacturer to me. Obviously there are pros and cons to things like TBHQ.
How Does Fooducate Work?
Fooducate uses the camera on your iPhone or iPod touch to let you scan barcodes. If the barcode is one of 200,000 products in the Fooducate database, the scan process will launch an informational page about the product, along with Fooducate's "grade" rating. As near as I can tell, the only products that seem to get "A" ratings are mostly natural, unprocessed foods. At the other end of the scale, no foods are rated as "F," either, apparently because Fooducate realizes that with hunger and starvation rampant in some parts of the world, just about any food is better than no food at all.
After you scan a product barcode -- or type in a search term to find a product -- Fooducate offers up alternative products that have better health ratings. They might have fewer additives or fewer calories or great nutritional value. When it came to the Keebler crackers, for instance, Fooducate offered some marginally better-rated crackers as alternatives, along with a bag of almonds. While I'm a big fan of almonds, it's not exactly an alternative to a cracker. I mean, it's really hard to use a spray can of cheese to layer up an almond!
In addition to showing you alternative foods, Fooducate will let you compare foods. Other features include a handy history of scanned foods that you can refer back to, as well as the ability to note what foods you like. If you want to share your thoughts, likes or dislikes about what you learn through social media, Fooducate works with your Twitter or Facebook accounts.
On the Fooducate website, you can watch a running list of tweets about Fooducate and foods that people have learned about through this app. It's pretty cool, and basically it's a reminder that you're not alone out there in the world when you look at boxes of cereal that contain brightly colored contents that must surely glow in the dark.
A Food's Grade Isn't Everything
Fooducate's grades, by the way, are assigned through the used of algorithms, and if you're so inclined, you can track down the explanation of the grades on the Fooducate website. The grades give you a starting point, but it's the alerts and information about healthy and not-so-healthy ingredients that help users. In fact, the trademark for Fooducate pretty much sums up the whole premise: "Eat a bit better."
And that's what it really does. To me, it seems designed to help deliver information that you can find on the ingredients list on the package in a more easily understood way -- for instance, you can learn that manufacturers can sometimes dance around trans fat by labeling it with slightly different terms.
If there's one way to improve the app, it would be to also provide the ingredients list from the package itself inside the app. Because manufacturers change ingredients, this could be untenable or result in legal issues with the food industry. I'm not sure, exactly, but then again, most times you're going to use Fooducate, you'll be holding a package in your hand anyway, which would have up-to-date ingredients.
The app requires iOS 4 or higher and only works with U.S. products. It's free, and if you care about eating healthy food, get the app and -- possibly -- eat a bit better.