The site shows that 1 can of Coca-Cola has fewer calories and less carbs than a medium apple: 90 vs 122 calories, 25 vs 30 gram of carbs. There is no other information, e.g no fiber content or added sugars section. Would this lead someone to believe, against common sense, that Coke is equivalent or even a healthier choice?
Edit: For those interested, here is a link to a similar system that contains more information (albeit not as polished): https://perfact.co:8443/Nova/
I never understood the motive of highlighting "added sugar" though. Who cares if it's considered "added" or not? I recently was browsing the cranberry juice section at a grocery store, and without going into detail, it was obvious that some brands are gaming the definition of "added". Also, many natural sugar sources have unhealthy levels of sugar. Perhaps a metric like sugar density or caloric density would be more useful.
I know this would defeat the purpose of a "simple" tracker, but I believe that we need to support the message that food is "complex" [1].
I agree that most products - I stumbled upon and tested - in this space are frustrating.
Would be nice to have a good UX to split food by meals (and have subtotals). But maybe that is too complex and you were not aiming for that!
Additional feedback: I think knowing if the food is weighted raw or cooked is pretty important. Sorry if I missed something but I couldn't tell if the "whole wheat pasta" were cooked or not. Uncooked was available for rice, though.
It would be much more interesting to me to have an easy way to access the information about "how processed" a food is, for example using the NOVA classification[1,2,3] system or something like that. I'm not sure if you can access that as a DB download or an API of some sort, but worth looking into.
If you can't get data on this, then I'm pretty sure you can approximate the nova score by based on the "added sugars" and fibre contents... although it would be difficult to tell apart "undisturbed fibre" vs. fibre added later on as additive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification [2] https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf [3] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova
If a 1st order rule of thumb is keeping caloric contents in check, a 2nd order rule doing that for nutrients individually, I wonder if someone knows a good but easy third order rule of thumb that takes into account processing.
Something like "when two foods have roughly identical nutrients, prefer the one that has ingredients you could buy or make at home" might either not help cause there are no two such options to choose from, or it's too obvious (fresh pizza at the supermarket is worse than a handmade pizza)
Is there a good rule of thumb that helps you pick relatively healthy foods in a world where many foods are ultra-processed already, and can't really be avoided?
For example: a sliced apple is technically processed food, but what is it sprayed with?
Most of the grocery store is made up of processed flavored glops of one sort or another. The Nova classification is new to me, but would certainly be interesting information (though possibly also fearmongering).
This already makes OP project better for me (subjective of course)
