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A new trend is invading all supermarkets in Spain and other European countries. It turns out that you go to the food windows and suddenly someone takes out their mobile phone to scan the barcode of a product, looking for information about how natural the product is, or how processed it isFor that, applications such as Yuka, MyRealFood, CoCo, etc. are used. We would like to stop and compare the most used, Yuka vs MyRealFood.
Both applications are designed to indicate to the user the "quality" of a food but what many consumers do not know is that this is not entirely true.Experts warn that these types of applications are not completely reliable and have some other problem that we should discuss. That is why we have stopped to investigate in depth how Yuka and MyRealFood work to explain to you which is more reliable of the two.
How does Yuka – Product Analysis work?
Yuka is the most used and popular app, with more than 10 million users and a database with more than 7 million of products and 300 thousand cosmetic products. Yuka is an app that helps us analyze groceries, drinks, and cosmetics. The app follows 3 criteria:
- 60% of the Nutriscore score, to determine its nutritional quality.
- 30% based on the presence of addictives.
- 10% if the product is organic or not.
The app rates products from 1 to 100 as excellent, good, poor, or mediocre. It even shows a tab with the positive and negative components of the product, drawing information from OpenFoodFacts. This app is characterized by heavily penalizing addictives and greatly rewarding what Nutriscore rewards (the presence of fruits, vegetables, nuts, fiber and protein). It even offers he althier alternative recommendations to products that in theory are not.
The main problem of this app is that it gives equal importance to all additives, some of which are essential and which should not hit the notes. In addition to that, we must also take into account that there is no study that says that an "organic" product is he althier than one that is not.
How does MyRealFood – Realfood Scanner work?
MyRealFood is an app specialized in the degree of processing, to which the NOVA classification is added. The idea of MyRealFood is to tell you what is real food, what products are processed, and to recommend that you avoid ultra-processed products so that you lose weight. MyRealFood is an app that helps us analyze food products and follows a very different criteria than the previous one:
- An adapted version of the NOVA system.
- The Chilean black stamp system for informative indicators.
The application classifies products into 3 categories: real food, well-processed and ultra-processed. It leaves aside the ingredients of the food, which are very difficult to measure with the NOVA system, and adds informative indicators such as: high in sugar, high in s alt, high in saturated fat, high in calories, etc.It also marks the additives if they are safe or controversial based on the opinions of EFSA and independent studies. He even provides a few tips for eating better. The application rewards products that are not very processed or have good nutritional profiles.
The most remarkable thing about MyRealFood is that it has a lot of extra features thanks to its great community, such as groups to share recipes, a forum with recommendations, etc. The application fails in the same way as the previous one: it has a small database and penalizes additives equally, regardless of whether or not they are beneficial to the consumer.
Which is better of the two?
If we analyze it coldly, we see that there are many problems behind these types of apps. The OCU itself has shown that there are many problems behind these applications The main one of these problems is the lack of transparency in the treatment of classifications.Neither of the two applications clearly reveals how it deals with all the criteria to develop a ranking of how he althy a food is.
Apps use different systems to measure the nutritional quality or how he althy a food is but the truth is that this is not enough to accurately measure how he althy or real a food is. To this we must add the number of errors in product analysis, as many additives are misnamed and some foods do not have all their components correctly on the product sheet.
After all these types of applications, many doubts arise as to how a big brand could spread the coffers of any of these applications to provide their products from being better ranked within the "non-transparent" margins that these applications apply to their selection criteria. Can you imagine this is happening? At the moment, no case has been revealed to ensure this, but it is true that after the lack of transparency with this type of apps, it is easy for doubts to arise around them.
What do the experts say?
Experts recommend taking the Nutriscore system as the most "correct" and most reliable. This is the way for users to be 100% informed of the quality of the food they are consuming. Nobody knows the products better than the manufacturers themselves and if we take this into account, Yuka, thanks to its larger database and the fact that it is based (in part) on this system, would be much more recommendable than MyRealFood.
Despite all this, the most "reliable" way to measure what we are eating and the quality of our diet is the use of common sense. If you want to lead a he althier life, we not only recommend you use these apps, but also ask the people who serve you in the different establishments and points of sale, looking for reliable information about all the food you eat. In addition to that, it is also recommended consult a registered dietitian in case of seeking to improve our diet, only he can indicate us in a personalized way what would be the best diet for our lifestyle and the needs of our body.
