App Advice For Healthy Eating

Health professionals and nutritionists advise anyone looking to improve their health or change their eating habits following the diagnosis of a health condition to read labels on food. Any packaged or processed food needs to be packaged and outline the energy value, salt, sugar and fat content, along with additives. However, unless you know what you are looking for, some labels can be confusing and unnecessarily time consuming.

If you would like to know more about what is in the foods you regularly buy, and possibly healthier alternatives, an app called FoodSwitch might be just what you need. It has recently been updated to include low salt and gluten-free food products. It is free to download to your smartphone or tablet from the App Store.

GlutenSwitch can instantly identify if a scanned food product is likely to contain gluten. It also recommends alternative gluten-free items, listed by order of healthiness.

At the same time, the app shows consumer-friendly traffic lights (red/amber/green) for total fat, saturated fat, sugars, and salt, and information about energy content.

FoodSwitch was developed in Australia by Bupa and The George Institute for Global Health and tailored for New Zealand shoppers by the nutrition team at the National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI) at the University of Auckland in partnership with Bupa New Zealand.

Lead researcher on the initiative at NIHI, Dr Helen Eyles, said the new filters to the FoodSwitch app would help people with high blood pressure, coeliac disease or gluten intolerance to make healthier food choices.

“Food choices can be really difficult for people managing high blood pressure or with gluten intolerance,” she says. “Many fresh or unprocessed foods are low in salt and gluten free, but in reality many of us choose packaged foods for reasons such as convenience and cost.”

FoodSwitch and its new filters make it simple for shoppers to identify the best options for their heath and reduce the risks of our biggest killers – heart disease, stroke and cancer,” she says.

Bupa New Zealand’s Managing Director, Grainne Moss, says it has become clear since the first release of FoodSwitch that there were large communities of people looking for some extra help when it came to healthy food choices.

“Having something without gluten doesn’t automatically make it healthy and as with processed foods in general, some gluten-free products may be high in sodium or saturated fat,” says Ms Moss.

“This isn’t about chasing a fad,” she says. “GlutenSwitch helps consumers who need to maintain a gluten-free diet choose the best options for their health.”

Users can scan the barcode of packaged food using their smartphone camera to receive immediate, easy to understand nutritional information on close to 30,000 New Zealand supermarket products.

When a product is scanned using the phone’s camera, the SaltSwitch filter indicates whether the product is low in salt and if there are healthier, lower salt options.

The GlutenSwitch filter indicates whether a product is declared gluten-free (by the manufacturer), is gluten-free by ingredient (doesn’t contain wheat, spelt, barley, rye and oats, triticale), or contains gluten. It automatically provides suggestions for similar, but healthy gluten-free options.