Food apps that rate the healthfulness of packaged foods have become increasingly popular. You can scan a food package with your phone camera and the app will rank it for its nutritional content. Some apps will flag ingredients and additives. If the product you scan gets a poor rating, many apps will suggest an alternative in the same food category.
But do they really help consumers make healthier choices?
They can, as long as you approach the use of these apps with a certain level of skepticism and keep some caveats in mind, nutrition and public health policy experts say.
"If you're just starting off, you want to eat healthier, you want something to help you decode a little bit what's on the nutrition facts label and ingredients, I think it's a useful way to start," says Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard University and a former federal food policy official who helped designed the nutrition facts label that appears on nearly all packaged foods in the U.S.
These days, Mande says he often turns to food scanner apps when he shops for groceries — he uses both Open Food Facts and Yuka, a popular app that ranks food products on a scale of zero to 100 based on nutritional content and the presence of additives, with bonus points granted to organic products.
He says these apps can help nudge consumers toward healthier choices, though sometimes the results provided can leave him a bit puzzled.
For example, on a recent trip to the grocery store, Mande says he used an app to score two versions of store-brand tortilla chips. The plain version of the chips got a high score, while the other, with a tequila lime flavoring, scored poorly.
"There was almost an 80-point difference in their score," he says. "I'm not sure it really is justified by the ingredients. But it's helpful to see how products are scored and it makes you think again about what's in them."
Sometimes, different apps can provide different scores for the same product, as I discovered when I tested several apps at a grocery store alongside registered dietitian Lindsay Moyer of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.
For instance, when we scanned an organic almond butter, the Yuka app gave it a score of 78 out of 100, which is considered "excellent," although the app did flag it as a high-calorie food. Another app, called ZOE Health, which focuses on nutritional content, the level of processing a food has undergone, and other factors, also gave the nut butter the green light. But a popular app called Bobby Approved, which focuses on ingredients, flagged it as not approved because it contained cane sugar.
Moyer says that, as a registered dietician, she advises people not to worry about a little bit of sugar in their peanut or almond butter, because as a whole these are nutritious foods, as long as you don't eat the whole jar in one sitting.
In a statement to NPR, Bobby Parrish, the social media food influencer who developed Bobby Approved, said: "We take a clear position focused on clean, minimally processed ingredients, avoiding refined sugars, inflammatory oils, and artificial additives. We respect that different experts may prioritize things differently."
Julie Chapon, the co-founder and CEO of Yuka, agrees that getting different assessments from different apps can be confusing. "These differences often stem from the fact that each app uses its own methodology, with varying degrees of transparency and scientific grounding," she wrote NPR in an email.
Chapon says Yuka's assessments of nutritional quality are based on Nutri-Score, a nutritional rating system used by many European countries. She says the company has its own scientific team, "which continuously monitors the latest independent studies and official health authority assessments. This allows us to evaluate each additive based on the most up-to-date and reliable evidence available."
Food scanner apps can be useful because they put more information in the hands of consumers, Moyer says. If you do use an app, she recommends opting for ones that assess food on their overall nutrient content — like fiber, protein, sugar and fat — instead of those that just focus on the presence of single ingredients. She says in many cases, how much of an ingredient is used — such as the sugar in the nut butter we scanned — is more important to health than whether any is present at all.
And, she says, approach the results apps give you with a grain of salt. She's heard stories of people throwing out the entire contents of their kitchen pantry after scanning their packaged foods.
"It's important not to panic, because some of the way that these apps rate food additives in the ingredients list is a little bit overblown. This may not be a safety concern or a reason not to eat the food," she says.
She also suggests looking for apps that are transparent about what data sources they base their ratings on and how they reach their assessments.
And apps alone won't help consumers make healthier choices, says Sundus Mahdi, a public health nutrition researcher at the University of York in the U.K. who has studied how food apps influence consumer behavior. She says evidence suggests apps can nudge consumers toward better choices, but the overall effect tends to be small. "Food apps are great," Mahdi says.
"The majority are free. They're accessible. People like them. They help increase awareness. They improve nutrition knowledge. But are they enough to improve dietary intake? Are they going to solve the nation's obesity problem? Probably not, and definitely not on their own," Mahdi says.
Still, former federal food policy official Jerold Mande says he thinks apps are the future of food labeling, and he thinks the government could help make them more useful by setting standards for the data used in apps. He'd also like to see the government work with companies to build a common database of what's in our food. The Department of Agriculture has a food database, but he says it's incomplete.
Chapon says a common database could be a positive step, but she worries it could be subject to undue industry influence.
For now though, if apps leave you a bit confused, Mande suggests checking the ingredient list on the package. The ones used the most appear first. "Looking at just the top three ingredients in the ingredient list is another useful way you can decide what food is in this food," he says. "If it starts off with sugar, for example, that should be concerning."
Or you can always turn to some simple math to help you assess the healthfulness of foods, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
He says three different ratios can be very helpful.
Fiber to carbohydrates ratio: First, look for foods that have at least 1 gram of fiber for every 10 grams of carbohydrates — the more fiber, the better, Mozaffarian says. One cup of blackberries, for example, contains 8 grams of fiber per 14 grams of carbohydrates.
"We and others have published studies that find that ratio gives an overall sense of carbohydrate quality" in a given food, he says.
Sodium to potassium ratio: Look for products that have as much or more potassium than sodium, "because potassium directly offsets the harms of sodium," he says. One cup of green beans contains 211 mg of potassium and 6 mg of sodium.
Saturated fat to total fat ratio: Unsaturated fats are very good for overall health, and "we should be seeking them out in our food," Mozaffarian says. It's the saturated fats you have to watch out for, because they can cause problems with cholesterol and increase the risk of heart disease. He says you want to eat foods where saturated fat is no more than one third of the total fat content.
And remember, the healthiest foods — like fruits and vegetables — often don't come with a barcode. Those are the ones we should be eating the most.
Edited by Jane Greenhalgh
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