Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The Yuka App Rated My Healthy Meals as “Bad” (Dietitian Breaks Down Why it’s BS)

Starting point is 00:00:00 So fiber one cereal, for example, got dragged down to a poor rating. Meanwhile, Miss Vicky's chips get rated as a good choice, like, make this make sense. Welcome to another episode, A Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantled Diet Culture Rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Today we are entering the fluorescent fear-lit aisles of the grocery store, guided by an app that claims it can decode every single bite we take. Yes, today I'm talking about Yucca, the app that can turn a perfectly innocent snack into a danger score with one scan and send the internet spiraling with a single red dot. But here's the plot twist. behind those dramatic ratings lies a whole lot of nuance and a whole lot that is missing so buckle up because today we're going to be pulling back the curtain we're dissecting the science the scare tactics and the seductive simplicity of nutrition by numbers if you've ever wondered whether yucca is a helpful guide or just another tool fueling food fear you're about to find out now before we dive into it i want to give everyone a reminder that my new book, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, is just weeks away from being in stores.

Starting point is 00:01:32 It is on pre-sale, and I'm so excited to get this baby into your hands and to hear what chapters have been most helpful for you. So whether you are looking for a hardcover, audiobook, or e-book, you can order it on Amazon, Apple, Audible, Google, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books. So I will be leaving links to all of that in the show notes. And if you pre-order or order and tag me at Abby's Kitchen using the hashtag Hunger Crushion combo method, you will be entered to win a free New Theory probiotic protein prize pack. So if you've been on the fence about this, now is absolutely your chance. All right, friends, let's dive into the massively popular Yuka app. So for those who haven't heard of it, Yuka is a mobile app with over 70 million users designed

Starting point is 00:02:20 to help people make informed healthy choices. about food and cosmetic products. You basically just scan a product barcode and Yucca will give you a score out of 100 along with a color code to make healthy living a breeze. Sounds great, right? Well, we're about to find out. As research for this episode, I paid for the Yucca membership upgrade so I could really give the app a full go to find out if this is a total life hack that everybody needs or if it's just contributing to wellness culture pseudoscience and noise. Now, obviously as a dietitian, I'm going to be focusing on the food scoring system, and I'll leave a review of the cosmetic and skin care side of things to my science

Starting point is 00:03:03 communicator dermatologists. So first of all, we need to walk through the three criteria that a Yucca score is based on. The first is nutritional quality, which makes up around 60% of the total score. Yucca uses a European labeling system called Nutra score, which scores for food from A to E, A being the so-called healthiest, and E being the least healthy. Points are awarded for fruits and veg, fiber, and protein content, and then points are docked for being high in calories, sodium, sugar, and saturated fats. The next 30% of the Yucca score is based on the presence of additives, which are classified from high risk to risk-free with a color guide to match. Now, whenever you hear

Starting point is 00:03:52 the word risk as it pertains to additives, I want your red flag spidey senses to perk up, and I'm going to go into a lot more detail on why this is in just a hot minute. Finally, the last 10% of the score is based on whether a product is organic, since Yuka claims that organic diets have health benefits like lower pesticide exposure, higher antioxidants, and reduced risk of cancer, diabetes, and obesity. I have some controversial thoughts on this, so definitely stay tuned for that. But needless to say, their scoring methodology definitely sent me into my first Yucca experience a little apprehensive about the app's intentions and the potential for fear-mongering messaging and misinformation. But let me tell you about what I found. So first of all, let's start with what I actually like

Starting point is 00:04:45 about the Yucca app. For one, I do like that they have a registered dietitian on the team. And which at least lends some credibility, even if I don't necessarily agree with their recommendations. I also like that they share reference studies for their app for transparency for where their recommendations are coming from. So that way, if I don't agree with their risk assessment for a specific additive, for example, I can take a look at the study that they've referenced and see if their rating is justified or if they grossly missed the mark. I also like that they operate without advertising or brand sponsorships, unlike other similar pro-organic anti-additive product rating systems like the EWG. And finally, I like that it's relatively inexpensive, even for

Starting point is 00:05:29 a full membership. So they charge about $10 US, 10 pounds, 10 euros, $25 Canadian, or $20 in Australia. And apparently they also offer a sliding scale so you can contribute what you're able to afford. But that's kind of where our love story ends. Let's talk about why I would not recommend the UK app hard stop. So to start, there are some massive flaws with all three components of their scoring system. And I want to go through each one starting with their nutrition criteria. So the NutraScore, which forms the basis of their analysis, has been heavily criticized, largely because it is not sensitive to nuances in foods or humans' individual needs and that nutrient-dense foods are often ranked lower because they are higher in calories

Starting point is 00:06:20 and fats. So like parmesan cheese, for example, which is higher in fat, but is still a really great source of nutrients, including protein and calcium, ranked even worse than a chocolate-flavored sugar-filled cereal because it is higher in calories, even though those calories are unquestionably more satiating and nutritious. There are also some very strange inconsistencies in their rationale for ratings. For example, cheddar cheese got a poor rating because of its sodium fat and calorie content, but whole milk cottage cheese got an excellent rating, even though it had double the sodium, more calories than the cheddar, and only two grams less saturated fat. Yes, if it were me, I would probably still choose the cottage cheese

Starting point is 00:07:07 over the cheddar if protein was my goal, but that doesn't mean that cheddar is a quote unquote poor choice. Another wonky example that I came across was with Nutella. Nutella scored 24 out of 100, with one limited risk additive, 4 grams of saturated fat, 21 grams of sugar, and 200 calories per serving. But when I found a chocolate spread alternative with less than a third of that sugar and fewer calories, it got rated even lower than the Nutella at just two out of 100, supposedly, because it contained some unknown, but likely minuscule amount of a completely safe additive the app deemed as quote unquote bad.

Starting point is 00:07:52 Another time, I found two listings for the exact same craft peanut butter, one with a 30 out of 100 poor rating, and the other with a four out of 100 bad listing for literally the exact same product. On the other end of the spectrum, their criteria for being a poor versus excellent source of a positive nutrient is not even aligned with FDA standards. For example, the FDA claims that for a food

Starting point is 00:08:21 to be marketed as an excellent source of fiber, it needs to provide 20% of the recommended dietary value per serving. So for a woman's 25 gram fiber goal, that would mean about five grams per serving. So then the question becomes, why would something like simple goodness crackers be called out as an excellent source of fiber

Starting point is 00:08:44 when it only has two grams per serving. Seems kind of random. Moving on to my beef on additives, which as I briefly mentioned are classified based on so-called risk. The problem with this aspect of the score is that they are not actually looking at risk at all. They're actually just reporting on the presence

Starting point is 00:09:06 of a potentially harmful substance, which is actually what we classify as a hazard. Hazards are simply a potential source of a danger, and honestly, they exist everywhere. A knife being in your kitchen is a hazard. A car being on the road is a hazard. A grape in your fridge is also a hazard. But it's the situation and the dose that turns that hazard into a risk. Are you giving a newborn baby a grape who's never eaten before?

Starting point is 00:09:38 Are you throwing that knife around your house? Are you driving around the streets drunk? In this case, reporting on the presence of a potentially harmful substance doesn't tell you anything about how much of that substance you would need to consume to make that an actual risk. And as I always say, the dose makes the poison. So to call something out as high risk without actually knowing the dose in that food is literally fake news, and it honestly eliminates all faith that I have in the present. program, period. Another inconsistency is that Yucca claims to base their risk analysis off of

Starting point is 00:10:16 quote-unquote research and reputable organizations like the EFSA and the FDA. However, all of these authorities have classified all of Yucca's so-called high-risk additives as safe and not high-risk. For example, not surprisingly, Yucca has labeled as a high-risk additive citing the IARC's classification of Aspartame as a group 2B carcinogen, aka possibly carcinogenic. But the IARC is not and will never be a good source to determine actual risk because they don't take risk into account either. They solely consider a potential hazard and they often do so off of largely faulty research. When you look at the hundreds of studies and data points that we have on Aspartame, we can see

Starting point is 00:11:08 that it is not a carcinogen in amounts that we as humans could reasonably consume. And to reach Europe's very conservative ADI for aspartame, you would need to consume around 1,200 cans of Diet Coke every single day for life to see a single potential negative effect. I don't know if Yucca realizes this, but you would probably die from water toxicity far before the aspartame could do shit. Now, generally speaking, I don't think foods like Diet Coke are really health food, so it's not like getting a bad rating due to aspartame is like a huge loss for public health, but in other cases, I do think that the faulty rationale of the additive category can turn otherwise really nutritious food options into something to fear. So fiber one cereal, for example,

Starting point is 00:12:00 got dragged down to a poor rating despite offering 18 grams of fiber per serving, just just because it contains a hint of splendor. Meanwhile, Miss Vicky's chips get rated as a good choice because they have no additives. Like, make it fucking makes sense. I also have to mention my issue with the whole organic element of the rating. I mean, if you want to buy organic, great. Like, I'm not denying that there may be some environmental benefits in some circumstances.

Starting point is 00:12:32 But the scientific community has long been in consensus. that organic food is not healthier or safer than conventional. It may have slightly higher levels of a few micronutrients, but the amount isn't anywhere close enough to actually move the needle on your health, especially not in comparison to just eating an extra serving of less expensive conventional produce. I also took a look at the studies you could use to reference their claims about organic food consumption being associated with a reduced risk of obesity and chronic disease, and guess what this correlational research actually showed? Organic food intake was also correlated with female sex,

Starting point is 00:13:16 higher monthly income, post-secondary graduate educational level, and physical activity. In other words, people who are already in an advantaged position with their health are likely also the ones who are buying and eating organic. So is it really the organic apple over the conventional one that is saving you from heart disease? Or is it that you have the money, time, health literacy, and support to eat a balanced diet, exercise, minimize stress, maintain healthy relationships, et cetera. Correlation does not equal causation. By giving points to whether or not a food is organic, Yucca is explicitly demonizing non-organic foods, which for most North Americans could mean the difference between eating five servings of produce versus just eating two or three.

Starting point is 00:14:05 This message alone is a massive strike against public health, whether you're actively using the app or not. It also makes for some really bad fucking advice. Like, for example, a serving of organic cookies on the app were somehow ranked as good, while a non-organic whole grain bread offering five grams of protein and three grams of fiber per serving was ranked as poor. Folks, a cookie is still a cookie, no matter how the grains or sugar was grown. And the organic health halo can further detract people from the nutritional choices that will actually move the needle on their health. And speaking of organics, we also have to briefly talk about the Yucca app's quote-unquote

Starting point is 00:15:01 healthier alternative suggestion. So in the app, if you search for a food that gets a poor rating, it will then give you a suggestion for an alternative with a higher score. And listen, I get that in some cases, these suggestions can be really helpful for folks. But due to Yuka's faulty rating system, their swaps, honestly, kind of suck. I compared the nutrition facts and ingredients of a lot of their suggestions, and I found that in most of the cases, they were far too similar to do anything that could improve one's health, yet were often significantly more expensive or harder to find. Let's take bread, for example. I scanned a regular whole wheat sandwich bread from the grocery store, and Yuka, surprisingly, ranked it as poor because it had four additives that

Starting point is 00:15:48 were classified as risky, which, spoiler alert, they were not. Their suggested alternative was Dave's killer bread, which I honestly really do love, but it's almost $8 at my local grocery store. And the other two suggestions that they made aren't even available in Canada, making them literally inaccessible to me. So I think if the app is going to make swap suggestions that actually make sense, they need to take price and location into consideration because otherwise, it is just elitist, irrelevant, and hugely unhelpful. So to button this up, would I, as a dietitian, committed to supporting public health, recommend the UKA app on Mass? Absolutely not. I would not recommend this app, even if it were 100% free. To be honest, I went into downloading the app with a

Starting point is 00:16:37 little bit of apprehension that I wasn't going to love it, mainly because the idea of ranking food for the masses is just so problematic to me, because we all have different needs and goals. But when I actually started scanning and using the app, I was truly shocked by how many problems I uncovered. It actually blows my mind and scares me a bit that an app like this is so widely used, and I think that it totally reinforces what science communicators like me are up against when trying to separate fact from fiction. At best, the Yucca app oversimplifies science to a point where its suggestions don't even make sense. And at worst, it misrepresents the science perpetuating chemophobia and food fears that will actually

Starting point is 00:17:23 result in people making worse nutrition choices like choosing chocolate breakfast cereal over cheese. Friends, foods are not inherently good or bad as apps like this try to make them out to be. We have to consider the context in which we are eating these foods, including the portion size, frequency of consumption, and how we are working less nutritious foods in with more nutritious options. We also have to think about our goals and our unique needs, which is something that Yucca does not do at all. So for some people, a higher calorie option would be a huge attribute, not a demerit point. So my advice is to skip this misleading app, focus on whole foods over highly processed snacks most often, and keep the following in mind when comparing packaged foods

Starting point is 00:18:11 in the store. Look for foods with less than 8 grams of added sugar per serving, the less the better, and compare added sodium between brands in processed foods. You'll also want to look for options with more fiber, ideally at least four grams per serving. You'll want to look for options with more protein, so at least eight grams for a snack or 20 for a meal, and more unsaturated whole food fats from ingredients like nuts, seeds, and coconut. In my new book, the hunger crushing combo method, I go into a lot more detail on the ideal ratios for your specific goals. So again, definitely check out the show notes for links for where you can order or purchase your audiobook, e-book, or hard copy. This is going to be the last episode of the year, so if you have time over the holidays,

Starting point is 00:18:55 I would love if you would catch up on all of our past episodes that you maybe have missed, and leave me a five-star review and a comment. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The Yuka App Rated My Healthy Meals as “Bad” (Dietitian Breaks Down Why it’s BS)

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