The Fooducate App is my new favorite iPhone application. Although admittedly, it now holds me back from living in blissful ignorance about my food.
What I love about this app is, you can scan barcodes while in the store and it gives you more in-depth information about your food. It provides you with a grade for the food item, offers calories at a glance per serving, and a percentage of people who like the item.
Then, below those initial tidbits, it provides you with a list of “Things to Know,” and this is where it breaks down the nitty gritty details. Here’s a look at two products I buy all the time.
My beloved Kashi Blueberry Cluster cereal…it’s pretty low in calories, but I was surprised to see how processed it really was, because when you think Kashi, you think “natural” and “minimally processed” – apparently their marketing team was effective. {ahem}
What I love about this “Things to Know” section is, it provides additional links titled “More from Fooducate” where you can go to articles on their blog and read expanded information about the food. For example, the Uncrustables below, (my lazy Mama lunch for my oldest girl) the link takes you to a blog post that shares Ten Trans Fat Facts which I found very enlightening. Such as:
If a serving has less than o.5 grams of trans-fat, the label may state ZERO.
Come again?! So, yeah, reading labels is important.
And now, I have to get off my lazy duff and start making real PBJ’s because these Smucker’s versions will not be making it into my freezer any longer. {Sigh} And not just because of the Fooducate App information, but because according to a recent segment on the Today Show, the author of Eat This, Not That shared that eating a week’s worth of these little sandwiches is like eating a bunch of McDonald’s Hamburgers.
But I digress…
The Fooducate App is free and well worth the download. Your health will thank you.
Image: Fooducate
