[LifeStyle] Apps that read barcodes to choose a healthier shopping basket

[#Steeven.™]

These applications are intended to guide the consumer to follow a healthier diet

Sugars, salt, additives, fats, or calories are just some of the words on food labels, but can we interpret them? Now, three mobile applications capable of reading the barcodes of the packages help us to reel off their content and to achieve a healthier basket.

Yuka, El CoCo and My Real Food are free to download and use apps. The first is French and the other two Spanish. Between the three, they accumulate thousands of downloads and compete to gain a foothold in supermarkets in order to guide consumers to a healthy diet, those responsible assure Efe.

However, although they share some criteria, each one focuses more on the nutritional value, the degree of processing or the additives of the feed.

"We are like three different knives, with the ham you cannot peel vegetables or with the vegetable you can cut bread," dietitian-nutritionist and biologist Juan Revenga, from the El CoCo app, summarizes to EFE.

This application arrived in March of this year promoted by a group of nutritionists now represented by Revenga, also a professor at the University of San Jorge in Zaragoza, and is based, like Yuka, on the analysis of ingredients using the Nutriscore index (a traffic light of colors) and also in the Nova index.

The latter measures from 1 to 4 the degree of processing of a product, with 4 being the ultra-processed category. Coco, which means "The Conscious Consumer", has more than 250,000 downloads; it does not give a grade to the food and is in the process of being revised to incorporate new analysis indices always with scientific scales.
"We seek to make people wiser since few know how to interpret sometimes confusing labels", points out Juan Revenga.

Yuka was the first to appear, first in France almost three years ago and then in Spain last June where it already adds 1.5 million downloads out of a total of 13.2 million: consumers who choose it do so, about all, because the other two do not analyze the presence of additives, points out the spokeswoman for the application, Ophélia Bierschwale.

This app, which has a carrot as its logo, gives a grade to products -food and cosmetics- from 0 to 100 based on three criteria: 60% of the grade depends on the nutritional quality obtained by the analysis of ingredients by the Nutriscore method.

Another 30% is related to additives and their level of risk based, they say, of "independent studies" and data from the European Agency for Food Safety, among others. The remaining 10% value the European bio label.

Additives are also indicated by the third of the app, My Real Food, although it is not its main focus and it does not do it like Yuka, but based on whether they are safe or controversial: "We want to give information that not all additives are the same, although this does not determine the level of processing of a food, "dietitian-nutritionist Carlos Ríos, promoter of this application, tells EFE.

Promoter of the Realfooding movement, a lifestyle based on fresh food, Ríos launched his application on October 1 and has more than 600,000 users who can see a classification of products in real food (fresh), well processed and ultra-processed (with the majority unhealthy ingredients).

It uses "an adaptation of the NOVA system" for this, it also provides nutritional information and warns with a system of black stamps if a food is high in calories or sugar, for example.

The additives and the bio label are the main objects of criticism that are made between them. Revenga (El CoCo) considers, for example, that the inclusion of additives encourages "chemofobia".

Ríos also makes a criticism: If you put the focus on additives, such as Yuka, the industry can present muffins without preservatives and colorings but rich in sugars "and you are going to believe that this is good."

From Yuka, Bierschwale defends himself: Although an additive has the blessing of European regulations, it does not mean that it does not present a health hazard, such as titanium dioxide, a colorant that France will ban in 2020.

And what do they think from the outside? The expert in nutrition and public health José Luis Peñalvo, from Tufts University in Boston, indicates to Efe that these applications can be "a great opportunity" to bring healthy nutrition closer to the consumer, but provided they have a scientific basis.

Peñalvo recalls that the use of Nutriscore and / or Nova coincide in all three, "which have areas for improvement, so we must be cautious when interpreting the classification of some products."

Processed foods that are nutritionally adequate, such as canned fish, could be classified the same as a sugar-free carbonated drink by following those algorithms, he warns.

All are available on Android and iOS and require the collaboration of users to scan and photograph the labels and thus increase their databases.