How accurate is the Yuka app?
Yuka is a popular food scanning app that provides ratings on the health impact of products. But how accurate and useful are its scores?
Nutrition Diva is hosted by Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN. Transcripts are available at Simplecast.
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Welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast, a show where we take a closer look at nutrition research, headlines, and trends so that you can make informed choices about what you eat. I’m your host, Monica Reinagel, and today’s topic was suggested by Cheryl, who was one of several listeners who have asked me about the Yuka app.
“I recently downloaded the Yuka app,” she wrote, “and I'm finding it super interesting. I was wondering if you had any opinion on its usefulness or accuracy.”
Yuka is a free mobile app launched in 2017 that allows users to scan barcodes on food and cosmetic products to get a rating on their health impact. Each product is rated on a scale from 1 to 100 and the higher the score, the better the product's impact on your health.
In addition to the score, you also get detailed information on the product's ingredients, additives, nutritional values, etc. If a product scores poorly, Yuka suggests some healthier alternatives you might consider instead.
Yuka gets (and takes) credit for the fact that it does not accept advertising or sponsorships from brands, which ensures that the ratings are independent of financial influence–which is important. But keep in mind that independent is not necessarily the same as objective. The ratings still reflect the biases of whoever designs the rating system. (More about that in a moment).
There are also some lingering questions around the accuracy and consistency of the system. Because the exact algorithms determining scores aren't publicly disclosed, it makes results hard to validate.
There are several additional features that exist behind a paywall. This is presented as a pay-what-you-want situation, however, if you want the premium features, you’ll need to want to pay at least $10 year.
And fair enough: I can tell you from personal experience that creating and maintaining an app costs a lot of money. Having a premium version of the app is one way to support the developers without having them rely on sponsors who might then attempt to influence the ratings.
In addition to the basic functionality, premium members can search products by name instead of having to scan a barcode. They can also customize the app’s recommendations to fit food preferences such as vegan, vegetarian, gluten- or lactose-free.
Another potentially interesting feature are the lists of “best products” in various categories. Instead of scanning a bunch of foods to find the highest rated ones, you an just skip right to the winners. This feature is ostensibly part of the free version of the app but in order to access these, you have to invite a friend to download the app. Which I found weirdly off-putting. However, in the interests of research, I did invite a friend to download the app. And even having done that, I was still unable to access these lists.
Let’s talk about the ratings themselves. How useful are they? Yuka bases its ratings on 3 main factors - nutritional quality, additives, and organic certification. Let’s take these one at a time.
Nutritional quality accounts for 60% of the overall rating. For each food, you can see a breakdown of the nutritional factors that are contributing, either positively or negatively, to the score: calories, sodium, sugars, saturated fat, protein, fiber, fruits/vegetables.
I see two main disadvantages of nutrition scoring systems like this.
First, they set the nutritional priorities, not you. For example, foods “lose” points for being too high in calories. But not everyone is trying to minimize calories. Foods gain points for being high in fiber. But if you’re following a low FODMAP diet, those may not actually be the best choices for you.
The other disadvantage is that crunching all the data into a single number obscures the various “plusses” and “minuses.” For example, a food that’s low in sugar but high in sodium might end up with the same rating as a food that’s just the opposite: low in sodium fat but high in sugar. But depending on whether I’m trying manage my blood sugar or my blood pressure, the two choices are hardly interchangeable.
Thirty percent of the Yuka score is based on whether or not the additives in the food are considered to pose health risks. Yuka assigns each additive a risk level (green, yellow, orange, red) based on published research and recommendations from bodies like the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and takes into account potential health impacts like toxicity, carcinogenicity, endocrine disruption etc.
But the app appears to operate on the precautionary principle. Any additive with potential health concerns may get flagged as risky, even if the evidence is limited or mixed. Given that some health worry seems to exist for practically every additive, this approach could end up being a little alarmist.
That said, Yuka does provide details on the scientific sources behind each additive assessment, allowing you to make your own judgment. However, fact-checking every item in your cart could quickly turn a routine shopping trip into a major research project!
The final 10% of the rating is based on whether or not the product is certified organic. Organic growing practices certainly have their proponents and their advantages. They may be healthier for the soil, farmers, livestock, and wildlife. But there's little evidence that organic foods are any more nutritious than conventionally grown foods or that eating organic lowers your risk of any disease. At the same time, organic can be quite a bit more expensive. I'm not sure I see the value in giving foods a 10% bump in rating simply because they are certified organic–or, by extension, penalizing foods simply because they are not. This is an example of a way in which this system reflects the biases or priorities of the developers–which may or may not line up with yours.
So, now that you know how it works, here are a few sample scores, some of which mystified me a bit.
Original cheerios are rated as “poor,” with a score of 30/100, despite scoring high for their protein and fiber content and being low in saturated fat, sugar, and calories. They lost points for being a bit too high in sodium but apparently, it was “risky” additives that did them in. (The additives consist mostly of vitamins and minerals.)
Yuka suggested Quaker granola as a better choice than Cheerios. Despite being 6 times higher in sugar and twice the calories, the granola was rated as “excellent,” with a score of 78/100. The fact that it contained no additives that were considered “risky” seems to have had a big impact on the score.
Not surprisingly, Twizzlers got a rating of “bad,” scoring only 4/100. Welch’s peel apart fruit snacks had a “good” rating of 60/100 thanks to lower sugar and a bit of fiber.
Impossible Burgers, with their 20-item ingredient list, were rated “good,” (69/100) while Bubba Burgers, containing just one ingredient (ground beef) were “bad” (38/100).
South of the Border Tortilla chips got a “poor” of 34 while Late July Organic Tortilla chips scored a surprising 94, or “excellent.” Despite being a bit lower in sodium and saturated fat, there’s not that much difference between these products. And it’s a little hard to understand how any tortilla chips could be considered an “excellent” choice (in terms of nutrition, that is).
The app certainly is a convenient way to get an overview of different attributes of foods–although I have a lot of questions about how those attributes are weighted to produce the final scores. And that makes me question its ability to provide useful guidance.
It might also make shopping more cumbersome if you feel you need to research everything you buy. (And I’m not sure you do.) You’ll still need to bring your own judgment and common sense to bear.
If you do decide to use Yuka or apps like it, some suggestions:
Thanks to Cheryl for her question. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, you can email me at nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com You can also leave me a message at 443-961-6206
I’d also like to invite you to check out my other podcast. It’s called the Change Academy, where we explore the art and science of creating positive behavior change. We’re going to be running a special series on the Change Academy podcast starting December 26th designed to help you get your mindset tuned up for a healthy New Year.
Nutrition Diva is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast and is supported by Brannan Goetschius, Nathan Semmes, Davina Tomlin, Holly Hutchings, Morgan Christianson, and Kamryn Lacy.
That's all for this episode. Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week.