Uncle Marv's Health Update & Yuka App Review

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of my Unhealthy Podcast, a journey that we're on to figure out how to live healthy and be happy. Well, this week I'm back with a quick little update. The original plan, as I had mentioned, was to talk about the Yuka app.

I will do that in a little bit of detail. But I also got a message from somebody who heard me reviewing the last two apps that I had talked about, the MyFitnessPal app and Fooducate. And since I had mentioned the Yuka app previously, they said, you know what, you may want to rethink that.

And they sent me two links to some YouTube videos that talked about the Yuka app. So I will go over that as well. The first thing I want to do is I want to go back because a lot of the reason that I started the show was to really focus on me and hold myself accountable to some of the things that I wanted to do to live more healthy.

And I had mentioned, I don't know, early on, I think it was the second or third episode, that one of the first things that I wanted to do was lose 10 pounds. And of course, that was in, I think, August. And of course, right after that, we went into the holidays and I did not lose those 10 pounds.

So I had to come back after the first of the year and kind of reset everything. And I know that I had mentioned, I think it was in April, that I would be embarking on clean eating. And I kind of started to do a little research on that, which actually got me into looking at these apps that I've been talking about.

But I can say this, that now I've actually, well, let me rephrase this first before I do this. So I actually had gained a couple of more pounds than the high that I was at before. So I was actually higher than I was in August.

But from my highest weight, I'll go ahead and say it because somebody's going to ask me and try to verify this. So at some point in March, I weighed myself at 234, which is the highest I had ever been. And I had always told myself, you know, previously, after I stopped playing ball and stuff, I was at 220.

And I said, that's where I was, you know, didn't want to get any higher than that. Well, of course, life happens and I got higher than that. So when I got close to 230, that's when I said, I got to lose 10 pounds.

And the goal was always to get back to 220 with a long-term goal of getting down to 200. But I wanted to start slow. So when I weighed myself in at 234, that was a time for me to reset.

And so earlier this past week, I actually was down to 224. So yes, I lost 10 pounds, but it wasn't the original 10 that I was supposed to lose. So I still have some ways to go to get down to my 220.

And then I'll figure out what I need to do to get down to the full 200. But that's neither here nor there right now. But I wanted to give you an update because every now and then somebody asks, and I just usually don't answer.

But this time, I thought I'd answer. So now let's talk about the Yuka app, which is kind of the app that I had settled on for the last month or so in terms of evaluating food from the store and what we were going to eat and stuff. And first, let me tell you why I settled on the Yuka app.

Even though I had mentioned with the previous apps that one of the things that I found frustrating was that there was only so many things that you could do on the free version. And with the Yuka app, you could basically scan all the foods that you wanted to scan under the free account. You did not have to sign up.

And to be honest, that's all that I wanted. I did not want to set up any goals. I did not want to count calories.

And that's pretty much what the Yuka app is. It's just straight scanning. And in terms of the scanning, the way that it does it, and it's similar to all the others, there are scores that are given.

The Yuka app goes from 0 to 100, and then it actually has a green, orange, red, where green is good. There's actually two levels of green. There's dark green for excellent, which means that I don't know if it's like 90.

I should probably try to see if I can find the scale. I don't know what the scale is in order to be excellent, but excellent means very, very good. And then there is a good green, which usually means that foods are around the 70, 60 range.

Orange is poor, and I believe that is under 50 in the rating. And then if you get down to bad, most of the time I've seen that it's been 0 to like 9 or something like that. So I'll try to find the scale here.

Actually, nope. Here's some chocolate chip cookies that are bad with a score of 24 out of 800. So that's the first thing.

And so very quickly you can look at the food that was scanned and get a green, dark green, orange, or red rating there. Now, I should also say that the Yuka app also had what appeared to be the largest database of foods. So a lot of times when you use these apps and go to scan, a lot of times you come back with an unknown food, even though the food may have been out for a while or it's popular in the stores.

A new app that I had also looked at, a lot of the foods that I was trying to scan, it actually says, you found a new product. Take photos of the packaging to add this product, blah, blah, blah. I'll review that a little bit later because I do want to go through some of these other apps just to compare.

But the Yuka app is the one that, at least for the last month or so, has seemed to work out pretty good for me. And I like it. And again, it's a very simple app.

It scans, gives you your rating, but then it also gives you a list of why the rating is. And, you know, it'll give you everything from is the product organic or not, how much saturated fat, how much sugar, how much salt, how much calories. And it'll give you, you know, how many grams or how many calories are in the product.

And if it does give you something where, for instance, under negatives, most of the time that there are negatives, it'll give the reason for the negatives, such as additives. And you can click more information and it'll give you what the additives are and give you the reasoning that it gave a poor rating or anything like that. And so, for instance, let me just go through the last thing that I scanned, which was a frozen blueberry package from Publix.

And this is a package of blueberries that I use in a drink that I do in the Vitamix. Sometimes I will do a drink as opposed to a lunch or a meal. And the Publix blueberries came out 49 out of 100.

So it is poor. And it gives the positives as some fiber, 4 grams of fiber, 80 calories. So that is considered low.

Zero grams of saturated fat, zero grams of sodium, 18 grams of sugar, which is low impact and it is in the good area. So it looks like the range for sugar is 12.5 grams to 25 is good. Zero to 12 is excellent.

Anything above 25 is poor. And then above 43.5 is bad. The reason that it got a poor rating overall is that it has what it considers hazardous additives.

And the additive here is potassium phosphates, which explains it's an antioxidant that slows down the oxidation reaction of food. Excess phosphorus can disrupt bone mineralization, damage the kidneys and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. The European Food Safety Authority has indicated that phosphorus consumption exceeds the safe level of intake for part of the population.

And then it gives even more. And it goes into the study that was done and lists the scientific sources. And for this particular thing, there is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Looks like five different scientific articles.

The European Food Safety Authority, the Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety here in the U.S. The French Institute of Health and Medical Research. So this has a lot of stuff in there. Now, the reason I'm going to not go into full detail on a lot of the stuff was because the message that I received from the person responding to me saying that the Yuka app is bad is they sent me to two YouTube videos.

And one of the YouTube videos, I'm actually, it's kind of weird what it is because when I watched the video, this was a video from somebody that was looking at the Yuka app from a cancer standpoint in terms of people that were using the Yuka food app. That you couldn't look at the Yuka food app based on the recommendations of what scientists are having cancer recovery people do. So for instance, there are some things where certain cancer people, they want them to have a certain level of fiber.

So the normal level of fiber that the regular population would get does not work for those cancer patients. There's a big talk about cottage cheese where the Yuka app doesn't rate cottage cheese as high as they would want because they recommend that their cancer patients use cottage cheese. So that was one of the videos.

I mean, I'm okay with that. I understand what that scientist or that cancer person was talking about. The other video is, and I'll put the links in the show notes so that you guys can look at these as well and not just think that I'm making stuff up.

The other video is from someone who calls themselves the food science babe. And this one's more interesting because this is from the food science babe and basically is somebody named Aaron who claims to have a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota. I've worked in the food industry for 14 plus years, both in the conventional as well as the natural organic sectors.

There are so many myths surrounding the food we eat, what's in it, how it's produced, what's good for us, bad for us, what it means to be organic or natural. I could go on and on. I invite you to look at the science-based information that I present and to ask questions.

And then I'll leave it there, but I'll again put the link in the show notes so that you can go and find it. And of course my first thought is, what does chemical engineering have to do with food? And it turns out that chemical engineers actually are a big part of the food industry because they are studying all the things that help improve food growth, where they help develop fertilizers and pesticides to protect crops and enhance their growth, which leads to higher yields. They provide innovation in food processing and packaging, develop new sterilization methods.

So these are all things that deal with advanced purification and protecting foods against spoilage. They enhance the food attributes. So again, a lot of things that we need because if we go and look at what it's going to take to feed our population going forward, we have to do some of these things to enhance our food growth and grow more crops, get better yield, not have spoilage and stuff like that.

Now on the other side, it does talk to all of the additives that are being put into our foods, all the things that stabilize them, give them shelf life. For people that are on the clean eating side of this, this is where they're like, you know what, we've got too many things being added into our foods that are probably contributing to some of the issues that we are seeing. So I'm going to kind of hold off on evaluating the Yuka app more in terms of giving you guys a review because I need to spend a lot more time looking at the science side of it as well as the beneficial side of it from my standpoint.

I don't want to spend all my time understanding the science behind it, but at the same time, I know that I've mentioned before, where do these people get their information? So for the people that are behind these apps, who are they? And are they scientists? Are they nutritionists? Where do they get their information? And I've mentioned before when we looked at the blueberry package from Publix, I've mentioned the fact that the potassium phosphate was considered hazardous in there. So I went and found one of the articles. I looked it up.

It's from the National Library of Medicine. And there's a whole article here on dietary phosphorus excess, a risk factor in chronic bone, kidney, and cardiovascular disease. So this is where one side might say, well, these are studies that aren't really tied to humans.

They're not studying real people. But at the same time, if there is scientific evidence that these things are happening, these are the things that I want to know about it. Where, for instance, one of the factors in the study was that the bioavailability from different foods and the nature of the actual food consumed all are a part of this.

And that this was contributing to lower systolic blood pressure and hypertension. And that higher phosphorus intake from dairy products was consistently associated with lower systolic blood pressure, suggesting that milk itself may play a role in either independently of phosphorus or in conjunction with it. Again, this is, I mean, I don't want to read this, but I want to know about it.

So that's where I am with stuff. So I know that at least now when I look at stuff, I can find the science behind stuff, look at it a little closer, and figure out is this the road that I want to go down. And I know that in the limited time that I have studied, studied? I haven't studied a thing.

In the limited time that I've been, you know, trying to figure out this clean eating thing. Yeah, I want less additives in my food. I want less chemicals in my food.

And so far, without doing any major exercise, without any major program, yeah, I lost 10 pounds. Now, is that because I'm eating differently? Sure. But is it what I'm eating? I don't know.

I will research that more and, of course, keep you all in the loop. But that's where we are. So I didn't want to go too long on that, but I wanted to at least give you the update.

But the YUCA app is where I'm at. If you are using that or you have another app that you're using that you think is better, let me know. And if you have information that you want to send me, like the listener did where they sent me these YouTube links, I'm happy to look at those and happy to have a conversation.

I will be having more people on to talk about our food, our health, our diets, as well as all the other things in life that, you know, tend to be unhealthy for us and try to figure out a way to, you know, turn them around. That is the goal here. Now, I do want to also let you guys know that I will be spending three weeks with my friend Diana Feinstein that I had on the last episode where we talked about the cauliflower pizza that I had.

And I'm going to do, I don't know, I think it's kind of a two- or three-week mini thing with her where I'm going to go through the initial part of her Max Health program. We are probably going to record that and use that in either the podcast here or a video segment. So I wanted you guys to know that the shows, I will have some other shows with some other guests on that, but that is something that I will be doing with Diana, and I will let you know how that goes.

And she's going to, you know, probably come down hard on me and say, look, if you want to get serious, you need to do these things and make me track my food and all that stuff. So we'll see how that goes. But that's going to do it for this update.

Thank you all for checking in and be looking for some more episodes on ways that we can live healthy and be happy. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.