New year, new you? Meh. Not so much. If you’ve already broken all your resolutions and feel like a huge rubbish pile of crap, then fear not. There’s another several hundred days left of this year to get yourself back on the straight and narrow.
Plenty of you are still into the whole cutting down on sugar thing. Which is defintely a good idea, as we got told A LOT in 2015. Too much sugar can cause obesity, diabetes and teeth damage. On a more superficial level, it’s also said to speed up the ageing process of your skin. Basically, down with sugar. And all that sort of thing.
The trouble we have, though, is translating the nutritional information jargon on food items’ packaging into our IRL concept of how much sugar is too much sugar. According to the NHS, your daily sugar intake should be around 50g – 70g if you’re a boy – but, when it's all in grams and different serving sizes, it can be easy to pretend that it’s all just too hard to work out.
Now though, Change4Life, the government’s initiative to help UK families get fit and healthy, has released an app to help you figure all your sugar woes out. It’s actually aimed at combatting childhood obesity but hey, there’s no reason we can’t jump on the bandwagon too.
The app, called Sugar Smart, is super simple to use. You download it, scan an item’s barcode and watch as the app calculates how many sugar cubes are in your product, before illustrating it with a nice drawing of lots of sugar cubes. There’s no mistaking the 46.4 sugar cubes that show up when I scan a 1.75 litre bottle of full fat Coke – that’s 185.6. Oh my gosh.
Sugar Smart currently works on 75,000 products although some of the more wanky products I tried (Bottle Green tonic water and Merchant Gourmet Indian flavoured grains – we’ve got some weird stuff in the Debrief office, don’t judge) weren’t featured. They do say they’re working all the time to add new products, though.
Go forth and scan, ladies.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.