Fooducate App Review, Colorectal Cancer Risk

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of my Unhealthy Podcast, a show that explores health beyond diet and fitness. And our aim is to transform unhealthy habits and lifestyles into healthier ones. Welcome to the show.

And today is going to be a quick show. I want to first talk about an article that I read that refers to a research study talking about the unhealthy lifestyles and colorectal cancer risk that is being researched. And I want to give a review of the Fooducate app.

I had mentioned that I was using apps to kind of track my foods and start to eat cleaner. So the Fooducate app is one that I used. And I will chat about that.

In the meantime, I want you to make sure you tune in because next podcast, I am going to be talking with Diana Feinstein, and we're going to talk about that pizza that she recommended to me, the cauliflower crust pizza. I actually tried that over the weekend and I have some thoughts about it. So that'll be on the next upcoming show.

But first, you've heard it before, smoking, drinking too much, being inactive, carrying extra weight around the middle, which is what I'm trying to get rid of, can all increase your risk of various diseases like cancer. But just how much do these unhealthy habits actually cause colorectal cancer? A new study is shedding light on the genetic links. So the researchers used a technique called Mendelian randomization to investigate whether there are casual relationships between lifestyle risk factors like obesity, smoking, alcohol intake, and physical activity levels and colorectal cancer risk.

Now, unlike traditional observational studies that can be thrown off by confounding factors, the Mendelian randomization uses people's genes as natural randomized trials to determine causality. As one of the study author explains, Mendelian randomization is second only to randomized control trials in the hierarchy of casual inference. Since genes are randomly inherited, this method can avoid the influence of confounding factors and reverse causality bias that plague observational studies.

So the study analyzed genetic data from over 177,000 Europeans, including 3,022 people with colorectal cancer, and here is what they found. When it comes to obesity and smoking risks, the results showed a clear causal link between higher waist-to-hip ratio, a measure of abdominal obesity, and increased colorectal cancer risk. As the researchers put it, genetically predicted higher waist-to-hip ratio was significantly associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer.

So they're saying that this confirms that carrying extra weight around the midsection, which is often described as an apple shape, is particularly risky when it comes to colorectal cancer. The study also found suggestive evidence that smoking increases colorectal cancer risk, especially heavy smoking and starting at a younger age. And then one researcher noted, our analysis suggests a potential causal association between smoking, especially heavy smoking, initiated at a young age.

So now the question is, were there any links to alcohol or inactivity? And surprisingly, the genetic analysis did not find any clear causal links between alcohol consumption or physical inactivity to colorectal cancer. So that doesn't mean that there isn't any factors that are unimportant. The study may have been underpowered to detect smaller effect sizes.

I don't know what that means, but that's what they said in the study. However, the researchers caution that this doesn't mean those factors are unimportant. Oh, I said that already.

Our study focused solely on a European population, so further research is necessary to confirm these findings in other racial or ethnic groups. So overall, this study underscores the importance of maintaining a healthy weight, especially avoiding abdominal obesity, and not smoking for reducing one's colorectal cancer risk. So I'm going to have a link to this study and put it in the show notes.

That way you can actually read it. It is from nature.com. They have a scientific report section, and the full name of this report is called Unhealthy Lifestyle Factors and the Risk of Colorectal Cancer, a Mendelian Randomization Study. So you can read all of that for yourself.

Now, I also, as I mentioned earlier, want to talk about the nutrition app Fooducate and talk about the pros and cons. And I'll be honest, I didn't get to use it very long because I actually got turned on to another app. But for the time that I did use it, I can say that from an overview perspective, here's what the app does.

It is the same type of app that I've talked about before with the MyFitnessPal app, where you can use a barcode scanner to log your foods and get a nutrition grade from A to D. So it does highlight unhealthy ingredients like added sugars, trans fat, etc. It also will suggest healthier food alternatives when a bad food is detected. It also is a tracker.

It'll track calories, macros, micronutrients, and of course, exercise, because that's what you're supposed to do. And then it will offer diet tips, meal ideas, and it has community support. And then it has the ability to personalize this for your dietary needs.

But of course, that is in a premium version. So there is a good deal of stuff you can do in the free, and then for some of the stuff you have to pay for it. So of course, you would think that the pros are going to be the barcode scanner.

And unlike the previous app that I talked about; you can scan foods for free. So you're not going to have to pay for that. It does give the nutrition grading from A to D, tells you the calories, tells you the amount of protein, carbs, fat that are in the foods.

And then it actually will describe the grade. So for instance, I looked up here, Sargento snacks, Balance Breaks, and that's your nuts and cheese little snacks. It got a C plus rating, 180 calories per serving.

And then when you dig down, it gives it more information where it says two tablespoons of added sugars per serving, more than 20% of the daily saturated fat. And then it talks about this, if you're doing dieting, food points value is a five. It is a naturally good source of calcium.

And then it says natural flavors are added. And then learn why. So it does give a lot of detail in it.

Also gives the ingredients as well. So that is a good con, I mean pro. The cons are that when I looked at some other people using the app, they talked about the fact that the grading algorithm, you know, from A to D is inconsistent.

Sometimes they're debatable. The app doesn't seem to really do a lot of personalization. So although it will give you recommendations, you cannot personalize it.

The grades are considered strict rules, not guidelines. And then it only seems to promote one view of healthy eating over others. So there's not much wiggle room when you want to do stuff.

So the app itself also visually is pretty nice, except for the fact that ads pop up all the freaking time. So if you go to hit, you know, things like the community, you're first going to be brought up with the option to purchase a plan. If you go to hit another button, you're going to get other stuff popping up.

It's going to ask you to enter your email to reveal exclusive content, and it's just insistent. So that's a problem for me. Another pro that I should have mentioned is that there is a podcast section.

So if you are somebody that likes listening to podcasts, I assume you are because you're listening to this one, there are podcast categories. Everything from food, weight loss, meditation, vegan, keto, intermittent fasting, you can actually find podcasts to listen to from within the app. And it gives a fair number.

It's not just a few. So that is your Fooducate app. I guess in conclusion, it's a decent app.

It's good for basic nutrition tracking. Not sure I agree with the grading system that it gives, although it does give you both the positive and negative of all of the ingredients in there. And it really seems to, I don't know, I don't want to say demonize foods, but, you know, it has little things where it says get fit for summer.

And then if you are a Fooducate pro, you can actually use it to lose weight. So there are some good things about this. Again, it, you know, you can put in a target calorie and it tracks what you eat.

But all in all, it was just something where once I found the app that I'm going to talk about at a later date, it seems to be so much better. It's not as feature rich as some of the other apps, but for what I'm using it for, it is fantastic. So I will talk about that app at a later date.

And with that, that is going to be it for this show, folks. Again, I'll have the link to the study in the show notes. I'll have a link to the Fooducate app so that if you want to check it out for yourself and you find something that you like or you want to add to my review, let me know.

Head over to unhealthypodcast.com, check out other episodes. I'll be back next with Diana Feinstein and we'll be talking about pizza. In the meantime, go out there and live healthy and be happy.