Do you pay attention to what you eat? Use this free app to find out which foods contain dangerous additives. You can even call on manufacturers to change the composition of their products.
As much as we try to eat as healthily as possible, it is impossible to know exactly what manufacturers put in their products. And this is a serious problem, because the latter do not hesitate to put a whole bunch of substances dangerous for our health in order to make the product more “buyable”, more addictive and more tasty.
Also, on supermarket shelves, the jungle of nutritional labels is dizzying. Unpronounceable names, mysterious E-coded additives, questionable flavor enhancers… Deciphering their meaning has become a real challenge for health-conscious consumers!
However, at the heart of this confusion, a tool appeared to help us see more clearly: Yuko. The principle of this application, available free of charge on Android and iOS, is simple: when we go shopping, we scan the barcode of food and cosmetic products with our smartphone, and Yuka deciphers the product labels.
The application indicates the composition of food products and cosmetics based on their barcode, then evaluates the elements according to three criteria: nutritional quality, presence or absence of additives and organic dimension of the product. The goal is to help us understand the list of ingredients present on each product thanks to an intuitive color code – red, orange, green – and to change our consumption habits, which allows us to have an impact on manufacturers and the legislation.
On November 19, Yuka added a new string to her bow. While controversies regularly arise over additives deemed harmful, the application makes it possible to directly challenge the manufacturers of products containing controversial additives. The function, integrated into the latest version of the application, allows users to send a standardized message to the brands concerned in a few clicks, pushing them to justify or reconsider their ingredient choices. A simple but potentially powerful approach, based on the mass effect.
The function comes in two ways. The first is to simply send an email pre-written by Yuka to customer service, such as: “Hello, I scanned the XXX product on the Yuka application. It contains an additive assessed as risk (Calcium Phosphates). This additive contains phosphorus, a mineral whose current intakes exceed recommendations and whose excess could disrupt bone mineralization, have a harmful effect on the kidneys and increase the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases. In addition, it could be in the form of nanoparticles, likely to accumulate in organs. I ask you to remove it in order to protect the health of consumers“.
The second is much more troublesome, since it consists of calling on manufacturers via a post, again pre-written, directly on X (e.g. Twitter): “I scanned one of your products on Yuka, it contains an additive rated as risky (E341). I ask you to remove it in order to protect consumers. #BalanceTonAdditive“.
“Unfortunately, public authorities are taking too long to ban substances that are controversial; we have to wait decades. There are also conflicts of interest. Faced with all this, the consumer has the power to act directly“, indicates Julie Chapon, co-founder of the start-up. And this “name & shame” technique has already proven itself in the past, with manufacturers being particularly concerned about their image. For the moment, this function is not possible only for 15,000 food products out of the 3 million listed today in France by the application. But this number should undoubtedly increase subsequently.