Navigating the supermarket—and even the freely available health information on the net—has become a minefield. But this is where you can use your smartphone to make smart choices.
Downloading credible apps can make it super easy for you to choose the right foods to nourish your children, helping you to ensure that their mental and physical needs are well looked after— and that diseases like tooth decay, obesity and type two diabetes are kept at bay.
Among the crowd of apps available, we reckon these five make grocery shopping a task to look forward to.
FOODSWITCH
What we love about this app is that by scanning the barcode of a product using your smartphone’s camera, you’ll get easy-to-understand nutrition information and healthier product suggestions.
You can use FoodSwitch’s Health Star Rating system or traffic-light labels to choose more nourishing prepackaged foods. And you can also use any of the filters—salt, energy, fat, sugar or gluten—to decide what you want to focus on, too.
THAT SUGAR APP
This free app lets you calculate how much sugar your children are consuming. You just scan a product’s barcode to see the how many teaspoons of sugar it contains.
Another great feature is that you can use the app’s search function to look up products, and common café and takeaway items. This is how That Sugar App increases your awareness on the amount of ‘hidden’ sugars in pre-packaged foods, encouraging you to make healthier, sugar-free choices for you and your family.
CHEMICAL MAZE
Looking for hidden sugars is one thing, but what about harmful chemicals and additives? These can seem like another language altogether. Chemical Maze demystifies the mumbo jumbo, allowing you to identify and steer clear of products with harmful additives.
The information is based on over 10 years of research, so it’s sound and reliable.
ADDITIVE ALERT
What’s great about Additive Alert is that you can use it to search for Australian and New Zealand food additives by number and name. It also lists whether an additive is harmful and any potential reactions it has been linked to.
Additive Alert is a free app, but is only available for Android.
AWESOME EATS
While the Awesome Eats app may not help you to choose more nutritious products in the supermarket, it might make your healthier purchases more acceptable at home—that’s because it’s a children’s game.
Awesome Eats not only teaches your child about fruit and veggies, but also gives them health facts and tips—while they playing fun and challenging levels of the game. You never know, you may find your little ones soon start asking for real food— here’s hoping!
Other than apps, one of the simplest ways to choose nutritious foods for your kids is to read the ingredients list. Try to opt for products with wholefood ingredients and use natural sugar free alternatives, like Nuvia, to make your own healthy sugar-free treats.
Last, but not least, if an ingredient doesn’t sound like a real food to you, chances are it isn’t, so best give the product a miss.