Recently we have been reading a ton of stuff about food and just exactly what is in it and frankly we find most of it downright SCARY.  We didn’t really understand the full extent of the issue and the more we read the more we have realized we have to make a change ourselves, and try to not put crap and other fake food products into our bodies. Now we definitely are not over here thinking we are the picture of perfection when it comes to eating. We definitely eat things we shouldn’t (ahem, goldfish for example) and we know we shouldn’t but we have recently decided we would make a HUGE effort to reduce the crap in our life and really get more educated about what we are eating. You are what you eat right? We don’t want to be fake!

This is really unfortunately harder than it seems because everything it is HOLY CONFUSING or we have been tricked or even worse, had information withheld from us! We are not scientists and we don’t really understand the truth behind things like soy protein isolate, BHA, Potassium Benzoate… We have no clue what they really are or at least we didn’t before. We also found out that the FDA does some awesome trickery and says that some things are GRAS (generally recognized as safe) GENERALLY?!? Really, does that mean sometimes it’s not? Who is going to tell us this?

We kind of enter a little freak out mode sometimes when it comes to thinking about all of it. It seems overwhelming. How in the world will we ever remember all the things we should know and avoid? We have used the trick that many say “Look for as few ingredients as possible and make sure you can pronounce all the words.” We think that that works most of the time but then enter Genetically Modified Foods, which P.S. they don’t tell you about the majority of the time.  GMO’s can be hidden in even the simplest of words making it easy to fail that “short as possible, readable words trick.” Overwhelming right?? We think so.

Enter our saving grace. We recently found the app FOODUCATE, which is downloadable for free on your smart phone. It is very easy to use and super convenient at the grocery store. On one of our recent road trip weekends we scanned EVERYTHING with a label in the car just so see how it worked and we loved it! You can find either one of us often on a trip to the grocery store scanning away! You can also visit Fooducate online and sign up there!

Here is what it looks like:

Once you are in the store you just press scan and hold your phone over the barcode label. It searches its data base and immediately gives your food a score. HINT: Make sure when you set up your account that you ask it to tell you if a product has GMO’s.

You will get a screen like this with what is in your food that you should avoid.

Once you see that you can decide if it is good or bad for you and if it is bad it will even give you alternatives to try. And as you can see from the picture above there’s a “fun facts” part where they actually give  you random tidbits about food.

BONUS! Remember how we told you it’s all confusing and we can’t keep track of how everything is made or produced or what it actually means. Fooducate lives up to its name and actually educates you as to exactly why to avoid that food.

We thought that we would pass this along because it is one of the easiest ways we have seen to help keep us informed and hopefully healthy.

What are some of your favorite food or exercise apps?? We would love to hear about them. And P.S. we are not being paid by Fooducate we just seriously LOVE it!!