Eating can be hazardous to your health!
You may wonder what got us to thinking about this topic. It’d be natural to guess it’s because of a New Year’s resolution since many New Year’s resolutions have to do with weight and eating differently. Good guess, but that’s not the answer. What got us thinking about the topic of what to eat is a free app for smartphones called Yuka. We recently heard about it from a friend of ours.
Here’s how it works. Yuka scans barcodes of food and personal care products. The app rates the products on how healthy they are for people. It gives the products a score of excellent, good, poor, or bad based on a numerical score from 0 to 100. The higher the score the better. Food products are based on three criteria: nutritional quality, 60% of the score, presence of additives, 30% of the score, and organic aspect, 10% of the score. When the app lists the additives, it also tells how safe or harmful they are for you. Another benefit of the app is that if the product gets a negative score, Yuka will suggest alternatives that are better health wise.
We started scanning the bar codes of previously purchased food products we had in our cupboard at home. We were surprised to find that some of the products we thought would be ‘healthy’ for us received a score of poor because they contained some hazardous additives. Good information to know. Or as it has been said, “If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.”- Common Sense. This made us think about making different choices.
This correlates with what an independent study showed about how people’s eating habits changed when they started using the app. They found that people changed to more healthy product choices when the app alerted them to harmful additives. People also appreciated when they were advised against the product because of excessively high levels of sugar, salt, or fat. The study also found some people might still purchase some of the products to have occasionally as a ‘treat’.
We then started using the app in the grocery stores to check the scores before we bought the product. We learned that one soup whose can label read ‘healthy’ actually rated lower than the regular cans of soup by the same company. We found that it has influenced our buying habits to include healthier alternatives. However, we also found there are some foods habits we have that are hard to give up completely. We justified it by thinking of the words of the famous culinary expert, Julia Child, “Moderation. Small helpings. Sample a little bit of everything. These are the secrets of happiness and good health.”
In checking further about Yuka, we learned that it launched 2017 in France. It rapidly spread to other European countries and then to the United States. It has over 10 million users and over 3 million barcodes are scanned each day. The company says it prides itself on being completely independent and objective in its ratings and product recommendations.
Some people may argue that “Ignorance is bliss.” They would rather not know what’s in their food. However, ignorance can also be dangerous. As Jim Rohn says, “Take care of your body, it’s the only place you have to live.”
It was interesting to learn that many people always buy the same product, not because they like it, but because they find it hard to choose a different one. That’s where the Yuka app can be useful. Yuka not only helped us easily evaluate the benefits, or lack thereof, of a product, it gave us healthy alternatives for products that didn’t score well.
Regardless of what your thoughts are about the food you eat, we probably can all resonate with the expression, ‘Our health is our greatest wealth.’ Josh Billings puts it this way, “Health is like money. We never have a true idea of its value until we lose it.” Let’s act proactively and take whatever actions we can to not lose our health.
What about you? How are your eating habits? Consider checking out the Yuka app to see if it helps you to make better food choices. We can’t go wrong by taking the advice of Hippocrates when he said, “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.”
Chanhassen MN residents, Doug and Lynn Nodland are success coaches and owners of The Balance Center in Excelsior. Contact them at WeCare@SharingLifesLessons.com
© Doug and Lynn Nodland 2023 Articles and videos may be shared in their entirety with attribution.
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