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Obesity is, today, one of the diseases that causes the most deaths annually in developed countries. According to data published by the UN, in the last 45 years the number of people suffering from obesity has almost tripled.
Much of the blame is on the food industry and the products sold by the companies that make it up, being the 64% the percentage of ultra-processed foods purchased by Spaniards in supermarkets on all food products, as indicated by El CoCo, a mobile application related to nutrition.
As a consequence of these factors, there have been several applications created to classify food, allowing consumers to quickly identify the quality of each product.
MyRealFood
Sometimes we tend to “save the best for last”, but this time it is not the case.
Directly we let you know the app created by Carlos Ríos, the nutritionist and dietician who is revolutionizing the food industry as we know it. Such is his success, that his Instagram profile already has almost 1 million followers.
Its success lies mainly in the creation of the “Realfooding movement”. This consists of the differentiation of food into three different types:
- Real food
- Good processing
- Ultraprocesado
Once the existing types of food have been differentiated, the Realfooding movement consists of the following, and simple, rule: “Base your diet on real food, supplement your diet with good processed foods and avoid ultra-processed ones.”
The feeding of this last type of food, ultra-processed, must be restricted to 10% of the total. To achieve this, it is highly recommended to avoid the purchase of ultra-processed products, since the proximity of these generates a high desire to consume them. In this way, its consumption is limited to social and cultural events.
This phenomenon is having a very positive impact on the health of the population, although of course, companies that sell products that are harmful to health are being seriously affected by not being able to deceive everyone who uses this application. In other words, slogans like “low calorie” or “light” are breaking down.
How this application works
Its operation is simple: you scan the barcode of a product and the application tells you if it is real food, a good processed or an ultra-processed, in addition to the nutritional information of this.
Additionally, it is a collaborative app, in such a way that the contribution of the users seems of vital importance. All of them can scan products and those that do not have any evaluation yet will be sent to the app’s team to work on including it.
Other features of MyRealFood are the ability to develop your profile, like any other social network, showing your recipes to other people or the ability to follow other profiles in the community.
Other similar apps
These applications, like the previous one, are free and aim to promote the consumption of healthy foods, as well as to have knowledge of those that are not.
Some of these applications are:
Yuka
To know ingredients, additives and organic products, being the first app to appear. It did it in France and since June 2019 it can be downloaded in Spain.
This app gives a rating of 0 to 100 to products, based on the nutritional quality (60% importance), the product additives (30% importance) and if the product has the organic label or not (10% remaining importance).
ElCoCo
To know the degree of processing and nutritional quality. It is based on the analysis of ingredients with Nutriscore, like Yuka, and on the Nova index, in charge of measuring the processing of each product.
The main differences between these applications are the way in which they analyze the products. This can generate some confusion, when finding products valued as healthy in one app and harmful in another, so you should select an app with scientific rigor.
Regardless of this, we highlight that applications to publicize which products are harmful to your health should be valued in a positive way, thus being able to avoid diseases such as those explained at the beginning of the article, since its objective is related to taking care of the health of the population.