Smartphone Aps To Make Searching For Safe Food Easier

[tex]

Hi All,

Ant's link to the Fooducate.com site triggered a in my head. Often, when we're shopping we come across a new or different item that appears to be interesting, but we don't recognize some of the ingredients in the ingredient list, or in some cases, we can't read all of the ingredients because we don't have our glasses handy, and the lighting is too poor and/or the print too small, or the manufacturer used a stupid background/text color combination that makes reading the ingredient list difficult.

As they say, "There's an ap for that!" For example, the Fooducate — Healthy Diet Food ap is available, and it can be used to scan the barcode on the product and produce a descriptive rating of the nutritional value of the product. This is a very highly rated ap for both iPhones and Android phones.

How about E-Codes Free: Food Additives, which provides information on chemical food additives (also known as E numbers), to answer any questions about any particular E code immediately?

Find Me Gluten Free allows searching (based on any address) for restaurants, fast food, bars, cafes, and grocery stores that offer gluten-free food. This is a new ap (introduced just before Christmas), and it already has excellent ratings, and it includes a bar code scanner that is still in beta development.

Then there is the Dirty Dozen ap, which is based on the Environmental Working Group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides, and it lists the fruits and vegetables most likely to have the highest pesticide residues (so they are best purchased as organic selections).

And if you're serious about organic food, Organic Revolution provides a way to locate your local farmer's markets. It also supplies information on the foods most likely to be contaminated with pesticide residues, and the foods most likely to be free of pesticide residues, so if you use this ap, you presumably would not need the Dirty Dozen ap. This ap also offers organic recipes, and other features.

Gluten Free Recipes 1000 provides about 1,000 gluten-free recipes, and allows searching for recipes by name, ingredient, etc.

Recipe Search is a good ap that allows searching for recipes just by listing ingredients that you want to use.

Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner is another ap that allows searching for recipes by ingredients.

The Gluten Free Scanner allows bar code scanning to check the product against a database of over 600,000+ products, to instantly determine whether or not the product is gluten free. This ap is brand new (released today for Android phones), so there are no ratings for it, yet.

And there are many, many more. Some of these may not work perfectly on your particular device, but these all have good feedback (except for the brand new one — which is still unrated). If any of then don't work right, just uninstall it/them. I downloaded all of these on my Android smartphone, so surely they're all also available for the iPhone. All of these aps are free, but some of them have paid versions, also, (that presumably provide additional features).

They're one more way to make shopping easier for people who have food sensitivities, or anyone who is concerned about the safety of their food.

Happy shopping.

Tex

[Deb]

Thanks, Tex. It looks like I've got a project to do.

[Carriagehouse]

Thanks for the good info, Tex ~ some of these apps sound very helpful. Can't wait to check them out!

[Gloria]

Thanks, Tex. I'm considering getting a tablet - I don't have and don't want a smartphone - and will be looking for apps. I just bought a Windows 8 laptop and it's going to take a big learning curve to use it and set it up. If I'm off the board for a few days, it will be because my old laptop finally gave up the ghost and I haven't set up the new one yet.

Gloria

[tex]

I just bought a Windows 8 laptop and it's going to take a big learning curve to use it and set it up.

I hear you. I set up a windows 7 machine for my brother, and I troubleshoot it whenever he has problems. I have trouble warming up to Windows 7. I hate operating systems that take away control of certain functions, and replaces them with automated routines that are supposed to be superior. It often turns out that many of them are not superior, when the chips are down.

When Vista came out, I spent $380 on an upgrade disk, installed it, and then discovered that it didn't have drivers for several of the peripheral devices that I use, and every time I would try to add a device, it would not only crash, but it would corrupt the OS, and It would have to be reinstalled from scratch. After a few cycles, I got tired of that BS, and I never used that VISTA upgrade.

I still use XP on most of my machines. I haven't even had an urge to upgrade any of them to Win 7. I built a new computer last year, but I installed XP Pro, not Win 7. In fact, I'm still using one that runs on 98SE.

I used to use Windows mobile in my handheld devices, but when Microsoft decided to completely redo the OS, and they didn't make it backwards-compatible, so that users could use their existing windows mobile programs, I switched to Android. I'm also considering getting a tablet, but unless something changes drastically in the near future, it will probably have an Android OS.


Have fun, and please let us know how you like it, because I haven't decided whether I want to try Win 8 or not.

Tex

[Gloria]

The technician at the store told me that he installed Windows 8 on his PC, but after a few days he uninstalled it. Not very encouraging. He offered to sell me Windows 7 for $199 to install on the new laptop. That doesn't make any sense. I'm still using XP, too, but am beginning to find it limiting, plus Microsoft isn't supporting it anymore.

I will let you know how it turns out. My Office 2000 won't work with it, either. IMO, Office 2000 was the best suite Microsoft has made.

Got to go to bed; I'm having a thyroid ultrasound tomorrow to see if my small nodules have grown. I hope not. I don't want to deal with anything else.

Gloria

[tex]

The technician at the store told me that he installed Windows 8 on his PC, but after a few days he uninstalled it.

Now that's downright discouraging. What a bummer.

Actually, Microsoft's support for XP will end on April 8, 2014, but I'm not sure what I'll do when that day rolls around. Unless something changes, I'll probably continue to buy computers without operating systems, and I'll just install XP on them. After Microsoft stops supporting XP, the hackers will probably stop trying to find new ways to exploit it, and they'll move on to bigger and better operating systems. That's my main beef against Windows OS upgrades — they just keep getting bigger and bigger, which defeats any speed increases otherwise offered by faster machines.

To my way of thinking, the refusal to allow backward compatibility for an expensive office suite is a fatal error for an operating system. Microsoft is simply greedy. You may want to look at Open Office. There's quite a learning curve, but now that I'm finally becoming more familiar with using it, I like it, and I especially like the fact that it's free, and all future upgrades are free. Here's a link to a Microsoft page on the termination of XP and Office 2003 support:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ ... pport.aspx

I hope the results of the scan are good, with no signs of any problems.

Tex

[ant]

Wow, so agree.

I bought Vista some years ago and it drove me to Apple. Now I am finding Apple (and gmail) inflexible and, worse, forcing me to use the Cloud where they can "own" all my data. Time to rebel against these monopolists.

Best ant

[tex]

That's what has kept me from switching to Apple products — Apple always demands too much control over their users options, especially with their mobile devices. And as you mentioned, Google is slowly but surely sliding in that same direction. As far as I'm concerned, they can stuff their Cloud concept where the sun don't shine. When the day comes that I can't use my own applications on my own computer, and I can't store my own data on my own drives, I'll go back to using pen and paper and filing cabinets. I haven't forgotten how to use a slide rule and a calculator. LOL.

Tex

[Gloria]

Yep, I think Google has way too much information about its users. Add Facebook to the mix, and there's not much they don't know about us. I have a G-mail account, but don't use it for communications. When I was a technology director, I ordered something for the school on the phone. I used my credit card, and the fellow taking my order asked me if any of a list of information he had was familiar to me. He knew my brother's names, my mother's maiden name, my daughter's names, etc. I was shocked. This was before Facebook.

Of course, it's possible to find a whole lot about people: their age, present and former addresses, by going to switchboard.com and similar sites. My daughter graduated from college 20 years ago and it still lists her college town plus every other address she's had since she graduated. We can't hide anymore...

Gloria