Food Tracking: Does Using an App Make You Healthier?

With a packet of biscuits in one hand and her smartphone in the other, Natalie Red appeared in the biscuits aisle of her local Hyper U supermarket west of Paris. Literally.

“Look here!” She said she showed me her phone. 0/100 is marked with a red letter.

“This is one of Malo’s[her 12-year-old son’s]favourites, but not only is it full of sugar and fat, there are four additives and one health hazard,” she says.

Natalie clicked on the add-on mentioned: E450. “Excessive mineral intake can cause bone marrow and kidney problems,” she reads.

“It honestly drives me nuts that they could put something like this in a food aimed at children!” she says.

We explore the Italian option, whose packaging makes you feel like those crackers were handmade by peasant women in black shawls.

The result isn’t much better: “Malo hates shopping with me now,” says Natalie. “You spend ages searching and he can never have what he wants.”

The app will suggest a healthy option after activating the red alert. It is organic with whole wheat, fruit and fiber.

“It’s too expensive to buy organic stuff,” she says.

Nathalie is one of those who use Yucca, an app made in France, to shop healthier. Not only for food, but also for cosmetics and toiletries.

Download it and you can use your phone to scan the barcode of one of the six million products in Yuka’s database (about 1,200 a day) and it will tell you instantly – green for good, red for bad, yellow for bad, for more. If you want to know more, you can explore further. Pages and pages if you will.

In the year Launched in 2015, Yuka now has 85 million users in 12 countries: mostly European along with the US, Canada and Australia.

The third largest consumer is the United Kingdom with around five million, second is France with six million, but by far the largest is America with 28 million.

Yucca has some high-profile fans in the US. For example, Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said it was his favorite app.