Good Food, Bad Food: How Scoring Apps Teach Shame, and Why That Is a Dietitian's Red Flag

At a glance

• Dietitians who have reviewed the Yuka app keep arriving at the same word: shame.
• Abby Langer, RD, warns that it encourages "orthorexic type habits".
• Kacie Barnes, MCN, RDN, calls it the "good foods/bad foods fallacy" and worries most about parents scanning in front of their kids.
• EatSure has no score and no grade. Its four levels describe how a product fits the person eating it.

The issue

Every dietitian review of Yuka lands on the same word: shame. Abby Langer warns that the app encourages "orthorexic type habits", an obsession with eating correctly that harms mental health and pulls food out of its social context. Liz Dunn writes that calling an Oreo "bad" "encourages a disordered approach to eating". Kacie Barnes names it the "good foods/bad foods fallacy" and worries most about parents scanning in front of their kids.

How big the problem is

With a US user base in the tens of millions, a Gen Z and millennial core, and the number one spot in the App Store's health and fitness category at its peak, the app's red-and-green vocabulary is becoming the way a generation talks about food. Barnes's advice is to learn to read a label instead of outsourcing the judgment.

What it means for you

A color on a screen is a verdict on the food. What a shopper needs is a verdict on the fit: does this work for me, today, given my allergies, my goals, and how I want to eat.

What EatSure does instead

EatSure's four levels are about fit, not virtue. "Great for you" and "All clear" are the common outcomes. "Go easy" means exactly that: the product has one thing worth watching for you and is otherwise fine, so the advice is to have less of it, not to cut it out. "Not for you" is reserved for hard lines: an allergen, a diet rule, an ingredient you chose to avoid. Nothing in the app calls a food bad, and nothing gives it a grade. The rules are written down in How EatSure grades food.