EWG's 'Food Scores' app helps decode nutrition labels

Over the past few years, a microscope has been cast over the kinds of food we eat and the nutritional decisions we're making. As people begin to question what they're putting into their body technology has evolved to accommodate the more health conscious effort, but until now a major component had been missing – what about all the additives being pumped into our foods? How can we be certain the foods we're consuming are truly healthy?

The Environmental Working Group has answered that call by developing a free food database application called Food Scores, which rates over 80,000 products on a scale of 1 (best) to 10 (worst) based on three factors: nutrition, ingredients and how they're being processed.

"When you think about healthy food, you have to think beyond the Nutrition Facts panel," Renee Sharp, EWG's director of research said in a statement. "It doesn't always tell the whole story. Food Scores shows that certain foods that we think are good for us may actually be much less so because they contain questionable food additives or toxic contaminants."

Food Scores took three years to create, collecting information from over 1,500 brands. By using your smartphone to scan the barcode of a product, you will unlock details about that specific food which normally wouldn't be visible on any package.

After scanning the food, you are shown three dials for nutrition, ingredients and processing, and their respective scores for each ranging from low to high-risk. You will also see a bar graph that displays exactly how the three factors combine to determine the overall score.

The formula used to calculate the nutrition scoring included factors like calories, saturated fat, trans fat, sugar, sodium, protein, fiber and fruit, vegetable and nut content. To gauge the concerns with ingredients they focused on additives and contaminants like antibiotics, mercury, nitrates, pesticides and hormones. The processing score reflects how the product has been modified from whole foods and takes into account the accumulation of any artificial ingredients.

Perhaps the most surprising facet of EWG's records was out of the 80,000 foods tested, 25 percent scored in the terrible 8 to 10 range. Fifty-seven percent of those scanned scored in the middle (4-7) and only 18 percent of the researched products received a score in the green (1-3.5).

We're finally on our way to a full understanding of what we stuff our faces with.

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