Yuka: Scan and Control What You Eat with this AI App

Artificial intelligence is very useful today and one of the most used applications is Yuka. This app can scan food or cosmetics and tell you what ingredients they contain. The app also provides a quality rating for this product based on these ingredients. In the next article we will talk about all the details.

What is Yuka?

Yuka is an artificial intelligence application that helps you regulate your diet. Through it you can make better decisions when buying and know what you consume. If you are one of those people who have trouble reading labels or interpreting the foods you eat, Yuka is ideal for you.

These applications help you avoid advertising messages that encourage you to consider products that are not useful to you. This way you can learn about the ingredients and foods you eat that you may not have known about.

However, since it’s one of the first apps to offer similar options, there are a few things you should keep in mind when you start using Yuka to make sure you get a good idea of ​​what it has to offer.

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How does Yuka work?

To scan as users, you need to use mobile camera to scan the barcode of the product of interest. The app then returns information and ratings for this product. In this case, the app will tell you if the product is excellent, good, bad or average based on the ingredients and the rating of the app itself.

To do this, Yuka evaluates three aspects of food: In the case of food, the nutritional value is approximately 60% of the cost of the food. This quality is measured by Nutriscore, the well-known Traffic Light Nutrition Score.

Based on this, the application evaluates the risk level (safe, limited, medium, high). Furthermore, the last 10% comes from food, depending on whether the food is organic or non-organic and whether it carries the European organic quality seal. There are two things to keep in mind when using yucca.

Evaluate foods for the presence of additives

The 30% honey mixture can cause some confusion regarding the classification of cassava. Basically, they give each food a score from 0 to 100. If your score is 100, you are eating as healthy as possible. To identify a product, simply scan the barcode with your smartphone camera.

It is a free, fun and motivating application to measure everything we eat. We can share this information with our family and friends and use it to see “who eats the healthiest foods.” Well, yucca can be an element of fun and a way to guide us, but it is not perfect. These requests must still be approved.

What aspects is the evaluation criteria for food products based on?

Yuka’s evaluation criteria is based on three aspects:

• Nutritional quality of the product: It is based on the French National Nutrition and Health Program. It takes into account aspects such as calories, sugar, salt, saturated fats, fiber, and proteins.

• The additive: In addition, the risk associated with the additive will be shown, as well as the corresponding scientific sources. If the product is considered an “Eco” product, it represents 10% of the grade, carrying the corresponding European ecological label. The App will show you the history with the last products scanned and also by clicking on each product a sheet with all its nutritional information will be displayed.

• Analysis of cosmetic components: But as we mentioned at the beginning of the post, Yuka also incorporates the possibility of analyzing and evaluating cosmetic products. This is evaluated the level of risk in terms of the effects it has on the user’s health, and is broken down into:

• High risk (red pill)

• Moderate risk (orange pill)

• Limited risk (yellow pill)

• Risk-free (green pill)

Some Yuka shortcomings that need to be improved

It is made in France and is not 100% suitable for our Mediterranean diet. For example, identify foods like olive oil that are high in calories. This creates a skewed nutritional score in which Coca-Cola Zero is significantly better than Spanish extra virgin olive oil.

It’s probably true that drinking a gallon of unsweetened cola is healthier than drinking an entire jar of butter. However, it is necessary to place the elements in the correct context and at the correct size.

Oil is useful when used in small quantities for cooking or making sauces. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, is consumed in large quantities without being mixed with healthier drinks.

In this sense, the Ministry of Health has announced that it will eliminate the Nutriscore classification of olive oil to avoid confusion among consumers. horizontally Your smartphone scans the barcode on the yogurt. Another important ratio that Yuka considers is that of the additives in the product and the resulting degree of processing.

This is important information that can serve as a guide, but be careful. The application classifies additives according to the “risk” they represent.

Because of this, the public may consider the additives dangerous, but they are allowed to be distributed in our country after proper testing. This can cause unnecessary alarms.

In short, these types of applications can help us with our diet, but they should not be the deciding factor in our daily consumption. It is much better to seek professional medical advice or choose raw foods such as vegetables, fruits, fish or unprocessed meats.

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What happens if users enter data incorrectly?

Most of the users rate these applications positively. However, many users disagree and criticize the fact of manually entering food data.

Internet users who have used Yuka point out that some products are rated as excellent or bad, when ingredients have actually been omitted or components that they do not have have been added.

Many times the system is not adequate to compare the data entered. In conclusion, this app is not 100% reliable and must be improved gradually.

However, the Yuka developers say that various changes are already underway to monitor to avoid these bugs. One of the barriers that the app faces is that it detects erroneous or inconsistent data and prevents it from being entered. We are currently working on correcting these problems so that the service has the best possible quality.