Kate learns exactly what is IN those cookies

I picked up an iPhone app to help me figure out some of the ingredients on food labels. It’s called “Don’t Eat That” and is $1.99 in the iTunes Store. It has made Gizmodo‘s This Week’s Best iPhone Apps list, a list I like to browse for helpful apps. You’ll find it in the iTunes Store in the Healthcare and Fitness section. The app is currently running version 1.3 and updates are frequent, but there is lots of room for expansion and improvement here.

You’ll have to forgive my total lameness at being unable to post screenshots—some of me is in 2010, but some of me lags several decades behind. There are good screenshots at the iTunes Store.

What I love:

  • The alphabetical listing is very thorough and the information contained in the descriptions is unbiased but extensive.
  • You can choose to view ingredients by their names as listed on labels, or in lists of ingredients that may aggravate allergies and asthma, are particularly harmful to children, are banned somewhere in the world and where the ban is in effect, and ingredients that are known carcinogens.
  • Foods containing Genetically Modified Organisms can also be searched in their own section.

What I’d change:

  • I’d love to have a section where I can add my own notes to each item for our own food reactions and issues. Rose, for example, is allergic to almonds and I would love to be able to tap once to flag each ingredient listed that contains almond extractives.
  • I’d also like ingredients to come up when the bar code on the product is scanned. Then, each ingredient should be “clickable” for reference without having to scroll down the list.

How I use it:

  • There are an awful lot of ingredients that are floating around in my brain with sticky notes attached: “This is also known as MSG”, “Do I really want this in my body?”, “Wait, is this something that’ll make a migraine flare up?” and sometimes it’s hard to keep it all straight. This little app takes the sticky notes out of my brain (freeing up those brain cells for much more important information, such as how to spell Kyrgyzstan) and putting them into what I often refer to as my “offsite brain.”
  • When the kids are tempted by some treat that this friend or that aunt eats all the time (“and they haven’t grown three heads yet, Mom…”) we will sit down with the ingredient label and this app. Once they decipher that this ingredient comes from petroleum and that ingredient is another name for a substance that kills their brain cells, they rarely ask for that food again. “Okay, how about an apple, then?”
  • And, of course, as a purely educational tool in the supermarket, I’ll sit a child down to research ingredients for things we just don’t want in the house at all. Overhearing our discussion, a woman once stopped mid-stride in the store aisle and asked me if I knew much about GMOs. I was thrilled to have information at my fingertips about the food on the shelves.

What a marvelous time we live in! Yes, food labels are a nightmare to decipher, but then along comes just the right tool to crack that lock. No more eating unspellable seventeen-syllabled-foodlike-substances for us!

As is true of all my posts, I do not accept compensation for my reviews. No one has approached me and requested this review, and I did not receive a “reviewer copy” of the program.

This post is part of Prevention, Not Prescriptions and Real Food Wednesday.

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