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Why food rating apps can miss the mark on nutrition

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Why food rating apps can miss the mark on nutrition

Technology meant to provide more clarity behind the ingredients in food actually deliver confusion, writes the CEO of Perfect Snacks.

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Cara Liebrock, CEO of Perfect Snacks. Opinions are the author's own.

There are wearables, or apps, for tracking most everything when it comes to health and wellness: sleep habits, fitness goals, meals and nutrition, and more. All of these can be tailored to suit a person’s specific needs, but there’s one area that lacks the personalization that the modern day consumer craves: food rating algorithms. These programs typically apply a universal, one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to generating a food item’s nutritional value, which can cause problems.

More nutritional data is available to consumers than ever, but the technology and algorithms that score it have an oversimplified interpretation of what is considered “good” and “bad.” For example, consumers today can scan a barcode of a food item they know fits within their nutrition goals, and be served back a score that causes concern.

These algorithmic nutritional ratings, designed with the goal to offer more clarity behind the ingredients in food, can actually deliver confusion, with binary scores that can penalize practical, convenient, and genuinely healthy food choices. These scores ignore the context behind terms like “processed” or “added sugar,” vilifying them when there are many cases that prove that options that are not ultraprocessed, or have added sugar from natural sources as opposed to refined sugar, can be healthy choices for people.


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