App Review - Yuka Food & Products Scanner
What’s in your Medicine Cabinet?
Ever wonder about the safety of the things you place on and in your body every day? Think about toothpaste, deodorant, soaps, sprays, sunscreen, etc. Little know fact: most of use are unknowingly poisoning ourselves every day with endocrine disruptors, chemicals and other toxins.
A friend of mine suggested the Yuka app and I have been using it for the past two months. I use it primarily to scan products and I found out rather quickly that most of what I was putting on my body was very poor and in some cases dangerous. The two most egregious examples were Tom’s of Maine ‘Natural’ Toothpaste and CeraVe lotion. Both were rated poor.
I then went through the other products that my wife an I use and just about every one was poor. Dawn purchases her hair care products from a very high end salon and they were particularly poor which was a huge shock.
If you want a real shock, take the app to your supermarket (I took it to our local Wegmans) and try to find a clean product that Yuka rates high. I probably scanned 20 different deodorants and only 1 had a decent score.
Why I like this app
Yuka goes beyond the basics, providing insights into the ingredients used in each product. From artificial additives to allergens, you'll gain a deeper understanding of what you're consuming.
Yuka makes it easy to find safe/safer alternatives.
Good interface / easy to use.
Biggest limitation
My only complaint is that, when used for food, Yuka is very against high fat products and really does not like saturated fat. I eat a very high fat diet and a lot of saturated fat (I do not believe fat is an issue - I’ll explain more in a future post). So I use Yuka to to look for bad chemicals in food but I discount the score if it is bad because of the product being high in fat.