Yuka is an app, made in France, in 2017, that thanks to a barcode scanning, provides you the harmful and the good substances that you can find in food, cosmetics and skin products.
see also:Discovering the Culture and Gastronomy of Florence, the Cradle of the Renaissance
Mr Benoit, one of the three founders of the app, wanted something easy to use and always with him to understand if what he used to buy for his family was nutritionally healthy. With his brother and friend’s support, the idea came true.
Basically, the app shows three kinds of colors: red for the risky food, yellow and orange for the mean value and green for the good ones. When the red dot shows up, yuka gives you alternatives that you can choose which are supposedly healthier.
But how reliable is YUKAA?
Obviously, it is an easier and faster way to do shopping: you scan the product and you suddenly know if you can buy it or if you have to put it back on the shelf.
Most of the functions are available in the free version, so you do not have to subscribe to any additional premium plan and, moreover, every two weeks, the team sends you a nice and short newsletter where to find additional information about nutrition, healthy meals or how to plan the right lunch or dinner, etc.
It is an independent app, which means that there is no advertising and it doesn’t accept sponsors, the alternative products are chosen by the team with no business links; so how do they finance themselves? They earn from the premium version, from a paper calendar of seasonal fruit and vegetables (sold in France only), from their guide for a healthy nutrition (“Le guide for une alimentation saine” translated in french) and an online course which includes about 10 lessons to learn the basis for a proper nutrition.
However, someone is skeptical: Beatrice Mautino (linkare instagram), an italian author, who wrote “E’ naturale bellezza” (“It’s natural beauty” translated in italian), highlights a very good point.
In her book, she talks about cosmetics and skin products, by making an example of the propylparaben. In cosmetics, the additives and preservatives are listed in order of quantity: the lower they are in the list, the less is their quantity in the product. If you compare two products, one of them with the propylparaben at the beginning and the other one at the end, by using Yuka, it appears the red button, so you should put both of them back on the shelf.
One of them was surely less harmful and, nonetheless, additives and preservatives, in minimum quantities, guarantee the safety of the products, they prevent the proliferation of molds so, consequently, they protect us and our skin.
Each button and each element in Yuka has its own link where you can find more detailed information and scientific sources, so you can understand the meaning.
But how many people do it? How many of us go deeper to understand the “why”? To better know the product and its pros and cons?
By using Yuka we just have in our pocket someone who says “Hey, yes this is good for your health and this is not” . As human beings, we always have to ask ourselves “Why?” is this item result harmful? What makes it so harmful?
Don’t let another machine replace our human brain. We still have it. Let’s use it and not let another app decide for our life. Especially, if we talk about health and money.
