Get Fooducated!

Fooducate is an app available on iPhone as well as on Android. It is like personal grocery advisor, helping people make healthy choices on their food. Its features include basic diet tracking, a library of food with knowledge about nutrition and ratings, a scanner for you to quickly check the nutrition fact and rating of the food, or to do diet tracking. There’s also “daily tips,” which provides tips and tricks to help make you a better shopper of nutritious food. Topics from nutrition fact labels current events and public health policy. Another feature that I’d really love (but requires additional fee so I haven’t try yet) is the personalized goals, I think it can be very helpful.

• Diet-tracking:

I find it’s hard to track my diet because not every food I had has a barcode or a label. For example the vegetables I got from Haymarket, the fish I got from fish market, the grilled chicken I got from a chinese restaurant, salad I got from cafeteria salad bar… They don’t have a label. Even the food with labels, sometimes I don’t know how to count the quantity that I had. I don’t have time to weigh everything I eat. I wish there could be an easier way to do the tracking.

 

• The food library:

I love this feature because it’s very informative. I learned a lot about the food I had as well as the food I shouldn’t have had. There’s also ratings for each food and products. The library is also connected to a social network, everyone can comment on the product. It’s interesting to see many people left similar comments on one delicious product and saying “Oh I love this, I hope it has a higher rating!” But I guess the fact is, most of the food we really really love are not too healthy. :p

 

 

• Scanner:

I really love the scanner because it’s so convenient! But only for foods that have a barcode. I know it’s big effort to build a library that includes all the food we can find from grocery store and it takes time. One thing I think very useful in this app is, if it cannot find information for the product you scanned, it would ask you to take a couple of pictures of the product and generate an email and send the pictures to the company. This is a smart way, and not annoying, to collect more product informations!

 

• Daily tips:

The daily tips is also very helpful and interesting to me. I learned something I never know and would never try to look up!

 

• Personalized goals:

In addition to basic weight control, you can also ask the app to help you choose food that’s good to your heart or your blood pressure– if you had this problems. I do have heart problems so I think it would be very useful. Because I believe the so-called “food therapy,” which is very often mentioned by traditional Chinese physician, can be very helpful in addition to medication.

 

• Alternatives:

This is another considerate feature. I scanned a barcode on a pancake and I was told it’s not healthy (with a rating C), and there’s a button called “alternatives” lead me to other similar but healthier food!