How to Avoid 84,000 Chemicals - Revisited
A life-saver smartphone app-YUKA!
Every day, you can be exposed to hundreds or thousands of chemicals that may lead to cancer or other chronic conditions. About 84,000 chemicals are in use today in our food, water, air, and other products, yet less than one percent have been tested for safety. Your next trip to the store to buy food or cosmetics could be dangerous!
Worse still, as I have personally discovered, you may already be eating foods or using products on your skin or hair that have been your “go-to” favorites for years. The combined toxic load of these chemicals can lead to a host of problems for your body, from skin irritations to chronic inflammation that worsens DNA damage, impairs mitochondria (your energy factories), and ages you prematurely.
How do you avoid these chemicals? Your smartphone to the rescue!
The App: Yuka
Several apps are available for your smartphone to help choose food and health-and-beauty-aid (HBA) products that are healthy and/or safe to use. I did a quick review of several and found them universally disappointing, except one, Yuka. A small team of health-minded entrepreneurs in France unveiled this amazing app in 2017.
As it happens, seven European nations adopted the Nutri-Score food labeling system in the same year to help consumers choose food items based on their caloric content and the amounts of sugar, fat, protein, fiber, fruits, and vegetables they contain. This health-score system has some problems, which we will discuss later, but at least the concept is good and has some useful elements. For food products, the Nutri-Score is 60% of the Yuka index of 0-100, with 30% of the score based on the safety of any ingredients, and the other 10% a bonus granted to organic products. The scoring of cosmetics and HBA products is based 100% on the safety of the ingredients.
The many excellent strengths of the Yuka app make it an excellent choice:
Completely independent and unbiased information: the company earns money from books and subscriptions and does not let any food or cosmetic company influence ratings
Enormous product database: including a growing set of three million food products and two million cosmetic products, with over a thousand products added each day(!)
Super easy to use: scan a bar code and get an instant score with product information that explains the rating and uses nested menus when you want more details
Science-based: backed by extensive, recent published research studies
Nutritional and safety information: the ingredient and nutritional component information is clear and usually much better than the information you will find on the package, if you can read it
Clear explanations: written so anyone can understand why a chemical is dangerous, for instance. Color coding and sorting make it easy to identify the most valuable information.
Good discrimination and alternatives: scores for products vary dramatically from zero to 100, but you will want to look beyond the score. When the score is low, better alternative products are often shown.
Huge user base: over fifty-five million users globally but probably with a small minority in the U.S., partly because they do almost no advertising (I first learned about the app when chatting with a new friend on a beach in Florida!)
Long history: over seven years in use is a long time for an app!
European “chronic” perspective: unlike the acute focus of lax U.S. regulatory efforts, if any, that would only consider a chemical dangerous if it caused short-term physical damage or death, Europe tends to look at the longer-term impact of a substance on health.
I know this sounds like a glowing ad for the Yuka app, but it really is that good and significantly better overall than any others I know of. However, it does have some issues you need to be aware of, especially for food.
Food Products
Some of the concerns I have from scanning food products include:
Calories and salt: The Nutri-Score system that forms a big part of the Yuka score includes a negative impact for higher calories and higher salt. The salt information can be useful, especially if you are sensitive, but recent research suggests that the salt concern is very over-blown. The calorie information might be interesting to some but is not a useful way to evaluate food.
Saturated fat: The app focuses on lowering the score because of fat content instead of distinguishing between good fats and bad fats. Our bodies and brains desperately need good fats like the Omega-3 oils in small fatty fish and the natural oils in avocados, olive oil, and coconut oil, but not the bad fats in highly refined soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, and margarine. Of course, these bad fats are usually the ones in ultra-processed foods, which you should avoid anyway. But please read the labels carefully whenever you see a number by “saturated fat.” We have a jar of extremely healthy organic kalamata olives that got a lower score of 42 partly because of “saturated fat.”
Sugar content: The score is lowered for more refined or added sugar, but it does not seem to reduce it enough, so look at the amount compared to the serving size. I scanned one product with 24 grams of sugar in every 30 grams of product (about a tablespoon!). That is almost the total amount of sugar a woman should consume in a day.
The information the app provides on fiber, protein, and additives is excellent and reliable. We need more fiber and clean protein in our diets.
Here is a food example of how it works:
From the first screen on the left, this product doesn’t look good, with nine additives! Click on the additives to see that three are hazardous, and one is a moderate risk. Click on the second additive to get details on acesulfame K, a toxic artificial sweetener.
From the bottom of the first screen above (portion cut off), pictures of comparable products will be viewable if the rating is below 50, as shown below. Details on each can be viewed.
Cosmetics
Yuka really shines here; I know of no other effortless way to evaluate the safety of all the products we casually put on our skin, in our hair, or in our mouth. Ratings are strictly based on the number and safety risk level of the additives in the product, so the ratings are easier to understand and more failsafe. Like food, additives are listed as hazardous (red), moderate risk (orange), limited risk (yellow), or risk-free (green).
Here is an example:
Cosmetics have fewer screens, but similar information. The hazardous and risky ingredients give this lotion a zero score, with details on each additive, and recommendations for better products. The specs on propylparaben, which is illegal in California, are seriously bad and run for another page (not shown), yet it is in hundreds of products sold in the U.S.
With toxic chemicals like this in so many products, I strongly suggest you scan all the cosmetics, toothpaste, and other HBA products you currently use and replace the ones with any risky ingredients. Knowledge is powerful!
So that you know great products are out there, I will close with shots of three products I recently bought. The buckwheat crackers got a score of 100/100, as did the soap, while the deodorant scored 93/100.
Note: Based on the writings of Functional Medicine doctors, including Dr. Mark Hyman (Young Forever), information from Yuka (see yuka.io/en/), and my own experience with the app.