Food tracking: Does using an app make you healthier?

Nathalie sees red in the biscuit sucrées aisle of her local Hyper U supermarket west of Paris, a packet of biscuits in one hand and her smartphone in the other. Really.

“Look at this!” He says you showed me your phone. 0/100 is marked in red letters.

“This is Malo’s [her 12-year-old son’s] favorites, but not only is it full of sugar and saturated fats, it also has four additives, including a health risk,” she says.

Nathalie clicks on the additive in question: E450. “A mineral that can cause bone marrow and kidney problems when taken in excess,” it reads.

“Honestly, it drives me crazy that they can put this kind of thing in children’s food!” he says.

We’re reviewing an Italian alternative whose packaging gives you the impression that the biscuits are handmade by peasant women wearing black shawls.

The score is not good: “Malo hates shopping with me now,” says Nathalie. “You spend a lot of time scanning and he never gets what he wants.”

The application that activates the red alert suggests a healthier alternative. It is organic, contains whole wheat, fruit and fiber.

“You end up buying a lot more organic products, so they end up being more expensive,” he says.

Nathalie is one of a growing number of people using Yuka, an app developed in France, to shop healthier. Not just for food, but also for cosmetics and toiletries.

Once you download it, you can use your phone to scan the barcode of any of the six million products in Yuka’s database (about 1,200 new products per day); it will immediately tell you: green may be good, red may be bad, yellow may be better. If you want to learn more, you can get more detailed information. Pages and pages if you like.

Yuka, which launched in 2015, now has 85 million users in 12 countries: the US, Canada and Australia, as well as many Europeans.

The third largest user is the UK with nearly five million, followed by France with six million, but by far the largest is the US with 28 million.

Yuka has some high-profile fans in the US. For example, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, says this is his favorite app.