One Hungry Mama

November 17th, 2010

{nutrition, kitchen aids} Awesome iPhone App: Make Smart Supermarket Choices

Time to get Foodumacated!

Fooducate is a new, free iPhone app that’s like bringing a personal dietician to the supermarket! Created by dietitians and “concerned parents,” the app scans product barcodes and provides you with a product grade, along with positive and negative highlights, product comparisons and better alternatives. It notes:

• excessive sugar
• tricky trans fats
• additives and preservatives
• high fructose corn syrup
• controversial food colorings

Fooducate does all this using evidence based science to analyze “nutrients to encourage” such as fiber, “nutrients to limit” such as saturated fat, sodium, and sugar, as well as information from the ingredient list. They are not affiliated with food manufacturers and claim that there are no external factors influencing their process other than the nutrition analysis that they perform.

So far, the Fooducate database contains over 160,000 unique products and works on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad (though, be warned: manual barcode entry required on iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone 2,3G).

Fooducate also has an awesome blog. It’s to the point, easy to understand and extremely informative. A hard balance to strike when dealing with convoluted nutrition labels. I also like that it’s not trying to push their product as much as extend their offering. Which makes me want their product even more. Smart and thoughtful.

What do you think—would you use this?

I’m all over it and plan on downloading Fooducate right away!