Idea for app extension

mattfara50

People follow many diets. It would be helpful if Cronometer could analyze a nutrition label with a given set of criteria to deem it acceptable. For example, someone following nutritionist Jeff Novick's advice might want to scan the barcode of a packaged food and get a simple readout of whether the food meets his recommendation, as opposed to performing the mental math. Similarly, other people might have more faith in other criteria. One might scan a food label or barcode with a mode selected, corresponding to publicly available criteria or user-defined criteria. Is this possible?

I_ROBOT

What would be an acceptable food? Nearly all processed foods have too much sugar, salt, artificial ingredients, seed oils, and lacking any useful fiber. Sticking with whole foods makes it a lot easier on the health and budget.

mattfara50

@I_ROBOT I agree, yes. There are some that meet Jeff Novick's criteria, however, and sometimes it would come down to taking the least of all evils unless one is willing to fast.

I_ROBOT

@mattfara50

I agree, it would be a rather clever app that could decipher the 50 or so convoluted names for sugar or artificial sweeteners. It takes good detective work to weed out labels with bad lighting and curvature of the packaging. Then, there are the sneaky tricks the food industry pulls to under report the actual calories.

Look at the food pyramid from the Department of Agriculture . It has been wrong since it's invention and they still can't get it right thanks to the food industry and it's lobbying efforts. The food industry does not want us to eat healthy organic whole foods as that would undermine their profits.