I’m scanning the contents of my flat with my phone. An app has told me that the oat milk I buy carries a “suspected carcinogenic” additive. My organic porridge tests poorly and contains food colouring and sugar. The kids’ battered fish fingers are “high risk”, and contain a texturising agent that is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease. Then I discover that their spearmint toothpaste contains “titanium dioxide”, which has been banned in the EU as a food additive and is a potential carcinogen if taken orally. I quickly bin it.
I’m using the free mobile app Yuka, which scans the barcodes of food and cosmetic products before sending you in-depth intel on how healthy they are. It then suggests apparently healthier alternatives – sometimes inappropriately, though (swapping my kids’ toothpaste for a whitening one?). Like many other mums, I’ve become hooked on it, mainly to check if the food I feed my kids is any good for them.
I decided to give it a try at home before I launched myself full throttle down the supermarket aisle. What I didn’t factor in was how terrifying it would be.
I’ve now emptied my kitchen and bathroom cupboards of things I’d never have dreamt possible. The sweet pancakes have come in as containing “risky additives”, particularly “potassium sorbate” – I’m told this can potentially lead to DNA damage and “adverse effects on the liver”. What?!
The rice cakes and ready-made tomato sauce are all good, thankfully. Popcorn, breadsticks, and Veggie Straws are fine. One particular treat, though, is so bad that the alerts mention “weakening of the immune system”, “intestinal inflammation” and “suspected carcinogenic”. Is this app a godsend, or the worst thing that’s happened to me in a long time?
Don’t even get me started on the bathroom. Who would have thought that the fun pink antibacterial hand soap I’d bought for my children to encourage hand-washing is a potential “endocrine disruptor”? I’m told it contains “high-risk” harm from an addictive “octinoxate” that the app has identified as increasing the likelihood of serious health issues and is suspected of interfering with the body’s normal functioning of hormones.
As I click for further information, the app states: “Several studies, cited by the European Chemicals Agency, report its [octinoxate’s] potential as an endocrine disruptor because it can block the effects of the female hormones and interfere with thyroid hormone activity. These serious suspicions have prompted the Agency to register this substance for further evaluation.” I don’t like the sound of that! But how reliable is this app – and should I be taking it all so literally?
I’m not so sure. But it’s easy to understand why the craze for apps like Yuka are on the rise – don’t all of us want to know what’s in our food and cosmetic before we buy them? Ultra-processed foods, specifically, have been linked to early death. The report, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, estimates that in the UK, there were nearly 18,000 premature deaths due to the consumption of ultra-processed foods. Each 10 per cent extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes, and ready meals, increases our risk of dying before the age of 75 by 3 per cent, according to the same study. And last week’s BBC Panorama special, titled “The Truth About Baby Food Pouches”, exposed how some baby pouches from six of the UK’s leading brands are low in vital nutrients and contain dangerously high amounts of sugar. In some cases they contained more sugar in a single pouch than a one-year-old should have in a day.
It’s all very well being paranoid about what we are putting in our bodies and onto our skin, but the trouble is that half the time, we are left in the dark. It’s easy to be misled by marketing; when a product says “no added sugar”, for example, it doesn’t guarantee a low sugar content. That’s why apps like Yuka, which has 65 million users worldwide, are so popular among the more skeptical Gen Z, who can feel empowered by making informed choices based on product safety and ethics. Some popular alternatives include Fooducate, BuyOrNot, ScanUp, Open Food Facts, ThinkDirty, and Clearya.
But while they are all the rage, it’s claimed that dependency on food and cosmetic scanning apps can trigger unhealthy preoccupations with “clean eating” and “clean” products, as people micro-obsess over every single ingredient and its potential impact on their health. I’m now one of those people. There is no doubt that it’s an unhealthy preoccupation to scan everything within an arm’s reach – and it has caused me utter confusion.
The way the app works is that once you scan the barcode, a product is rated bad (red), poor (amber), good (lime green) or excellent (darker green). Scores out of 100 are based on the nutritional content – such as sugar, fat, salt and additives. For example, my olive oil is “good” (72/100), with its listed positives including “no hazardous substances”, “no sugar”, “no salt”, and a good “saturates” ratio. The listed negative is that the oil is too calorific (822kcal per 100g). There are some item scores that are particularly baffling. It can give a high score for something that is ultra-processed, like margherita pizza (good; 63/100), because it is low sugar with an excellent amount of protein and only a “limited risk”. In the pizza’s case, from the food colouring. (A spokesperson for Yuka said the app should be used “to guide [users] toward the least processed, most balanced option available in the aisle. Telling users that all pizzas are unhealthy wouldn’t help them make practical improvements in their daily choices or move toward a better overall diet.”)
But the reliability of such apps has been criticised on TikTok, with people up in arms about the scoring systems and the algorithms that guide them. Since Yuka doesn’t look at the concentration of additives in an item – it simply scores the product lower as soon as it contains it – how much can we trust them?
The Yuka app reportedly rates products based on evidence from collective assessment reports, notably from the European Food Safety Authority, the French Agency for Food, Environmental, and Occupational Health & Safety, the World Health Organisation and the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It also backs up its research with European scientific studies, and relevant independent scientific studies, classified by level of evidence. But what is the statistical likelihood of being harmed by an additive in a fish finger, for example? Are we just blindly buying into fear-mongering?
“A much more serious problem is the lack of long-chain omega-3 from fish and seafood in a children’s diet,” says Dr Alex Richardson, author of They Are What You Feed Them and founder of the FAB Research charity. “Fish fingers on balance are likely to be good for a child’s mood, behaviour and learning, although baked is always preferred to deep fried.” While some additives, she tells me, are needed to keep food safe, others are purely cosmetic and only added to make non-nutritious look or taste appealing. “People need to know the difference,” she says. And with anything toxic, the dose makes the poison. “These apps don’t tell you the quantity, so it’s not telling you anything useful,” she says. “The devil is in the details.” Her advice: “Eat real food as far as possible.”
Dr Richardson, overall, is cynical about apps like these. “Most of these apps are manipulating parents with fear and worry while not giving them the details needed to be properly informed.”
A spokesperson for Yuka disputed this, writing in a statement that “this idea fundamentally misrepresents the app’s purpose,” adding that Yuka was created “to empower consumers by giving them clear, accessible information about what they buy – and to provide solutions”. They pointed to the app recommending similar products with better scores if you’ve scanned an item the app dislikes, and that the results are all based on existing scientific studies, among them “collective assessment reports” and “relevant independent scientific studies”. “Yuka doesn’t rely on fear, it empowers through education and clarity,” the spokesperson said.
Dr Kremlin Wickramasinghe from the World Health Organisation (WHO) points out there is difficulty in trusting one app or industry-led Nutrient Profile Models (NPMs) – systems used to evaluate the nutritional quality of foods and drinks by assigning a score or ranking based on their nutrient composition.
“There are hundreds of these NPMs, most of them are developed by the food industry or the app developers,” he says. “Few of them are developed by governments or researchers funded by government funding sources. It takes a long time to test these models against thousands of products to comfortably say it does the job as it is expected.”
When the tool is used in multiple countries, he adds, there are always issues, and they need to be adjusted. “We don’t have a way to verify these apps or their scientific criteria behind the decision-making process,” he says. The app user also cannot see the exact algorithm in a NPM, and they might be using different criteria for ingredients like sugar and salt, which may not be in line with national or WHO guidelines. “But,” he says, “we can understand how useful it can be if the rigorous testing and scientific process has been followed.”
A Yuka spokesperson said that the app’s scoring system is 60 per cent based on the Nutri-Score, a rating system adopted in “seven European countries”, and backed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which has highlighted its effectiveness in guiding consumers toward healthier food choices. They added that “the section [in the app’s results list] on additives is studied in detail both by our in-house toxicologist and in collaboration with external scientific consulting experts and not by developers”.
Dr Caroline Taylor, the Associate Professor in Nutrition at the University of Bristol, says that both the portion size and frequency of consumption are important in determining how “healthy” a product is. “For example, I’m sure chocolate would not score well, being high in fat and sugar and low in fibre, and with some environmental concerns,” she says. “But if you only eat one square a fortnight, it hardly matters for an individual’s health, or environmentally.”
Where does this leave me – and an army of Yuka devotees? I was totally convinced by it – as have so many of my mum friends. I’m still going to be pointing my phone at absolutely everything, but I will also take the results with a pinch of salt. The truth is that it’s a useful guide when choosing pre-made foods, such as tomato pasta sauce and oven chips. Some are clearly so much healthier than others. But I won’t be blacklisting products just because they contain a red flag additive. It turns eating into an obstacle course – and sets us up to strive for absolute perfection. Really, the answer is I need to put the app down and cook from scratch.
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