A new app aims to âdemystifyâ food labels by helping Canadians differentiate between natural sugars and unhealthy added sugars when shopping for groceries.
Available for iPhones and iPads, ââ allows shoppers to scan bar codes to reveal how many teaspoons of âfreeâ or additional sugars are in an item.
Free sugars and healthy natural sugars -- such as those occurring in fruits and vegetables -- are currently lumped together on Canadian food labels.
âWhat weâre doing with the app is getting information out to the public that theyâre not getting on the nutrition facts label right now,â Natalie Bibeau, the appâs creator,
Developed by a Montreal digital agency in conjunction with University of Toronto nutritionists, âOne Sweet Appâ holds a database of common grocery store items, such as juices, cereals and desserts, and their free sugar contents. If a user scans an unlisted item, a researcher will calculate its free sugar content and add it to the database.
Earlier this year, The World Health Organization (WHO) released a report saying that free sugars should only make up about 10 per cent of an individualâs total daily energy intake.
âFree sugars provide us with little to no nutritional benefit, beside calories,â said University of Toronto researcher Jodi Bernstein, who worked on the app. âItâs very important that consumers have free sugars information available to them.â
The idea for an app came as Bibeau was working on âSugar Coated,â a documentary that takes a harsh look at the sugar industry.
âWe realized that we ourselves were confused about some of these things and likely we werenât the only ones. So we started to look at what we could do on a practical level,â she said.
Bibeau says that the app has revealed several surprises.
âMy favourite one is juice, because as a mother of two young children I wouldâve thought that 100 per cent fruit juice was a healthy product. Iâm not suggesting that itâs an unhealthy product, but Iâm saying thereâs quite a bit of free sugar in this product,â she said.
Bibeau says the main blame lies with the food industry, which she says should take more responsibility for âtruth-tellingâ on packaging.
âWe need to be a little bit more forthcoming about whatâs inside the food.â