EWG's Healthy Living
How does your food score? How many personal-care products do you use in a day?
EWG’s Healthy Living provides mobile access to our our Food Scores and Skin Deep guides, providing on-the-go information on tens of thousands of foods and more than 72,000 personal care productsHealthy Living provides a simple, searchable on-the-go guide for consumers interested in making healthy, affordable decisions about food and personal care products that’s good for people and the planet.
About Food Scores:
How do we know what we’re eating, really? Food processors make so many claims these days. Supermarkets are loaded with foods that contain chemicals no one can pronounce.
The Food Scores database includes more than:
• 80,000 products
• 5,000 ingredients
• 1,500 brandsHow did we come up with our scores? We combine these ratings into a single overall product score.-
- Nutrition. The nutrition scoring algorithm considers multiple factors, including calories, saturated fat, trans fat, sugar, sodium, protein, fiber and fruit, vegetable and nut content.-
- Ingredient concerns. The ingredient concerns algorithm focuses on factors such as the likely presence of key contaminants, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics and the health implications of certain food additives.
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- Processing. The processing score reflects EWG's best estimate of the extent to which a particular food has been processed. Scoring factors include modification of individual ingredients from whole foods and the number of artificial ingredients.
About Healthy Living:
Your grooming rituals probably include shampoo, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, lip balm, sunscreen, body lotion, shaving products, and/or makeup.And what about your children? Sunscreen, diaper cream, shampoo and lotion are common kids’ products.Most people use cosmetics and other personal-care items without a second thought, believing that the government makes sure they’re safe. Not so. No health studies or pre-market testing are required.EWG’s Skin Deep® Cosmetics Database is the world's largest safety reference tool for personal-care products. EWG has launched this app to provide you with easy-to-navigate safety ratings at your fingertips for a wide range of products and ingredients on the market.Americans’ frequent exposure to cosmetics and personal-care products raises questions about the potential health risks of the myriad under-assessed ingredients they contain. These ingredients end up in the bodies of nearly every American.When you know what chemicals are in the products you bring into your home and how they may affect your health and the environment, you can make informed purchasing decisions — and help transform the marketplace.This app has information and online safety assessments for more than 72,000 personal care products, 2,500 brands and 9,000 ingredients, culled from product labels and from the scientific and industry literature.
To calculate a product score, we tally the hazards of each ingredient and evaluate every product in relation to all the others in Skin Deep®. The safest products score well by both measures: a low hazard rating AND fair or better data availability. EWG’s ratings are the best available information you can find on the safety of personal-care product ingredients.
Category : Lifestyle
Reviews (29)
Great app Roth plenty of info. A big flaw that really bothers me is to not be able to change the filter of the results. I'm trying to use the app to help high school students stay away from highly processed foods and harmful ingredients, but the app won't sort the results with the worst scores first. I have to scroll for hours for certain search results to view the worst products in that category. If not for this bug, this app would be top notch!
This app is useless. It doesn't recognize the most common items being sold. For example I scanned three products in Hollister ( parfum, spray and body lotion). None of them was in the database! Same issue in Target when I scanned multiple food items. I tried a different approach. Looked up a safe product with low score and tried to buy it in the local stores and online( Amazon). Impossible! The idea behind this app is great but unfortunately it doesn't work in real life.
while the website is great, the app is really lacking. The barcode scanner does not work, and there is no way to add barcodes to items that are already in the database for others if they scan the item. I also think it would be nice if you could flag certain ingredients that you want to avoid especially (example for known allergies).
Can't register for an account. When I try, I'm met with "unknown error occured”. A simple search for almost ANYTHING comes back with "no results found". This app is a complete waste of space on your phone. Fyi their website is almost as useless right now, super buggy. Do not recommend.
The concept for this app is great but the database needs to expand to include more products which, I imagine is a difficult ever growing task with so many products in every category on the market. I wish there was an option to simply check for ingredients within a product if the product has not yet been added to the database and given a score. Being able to take a pic of the ingredients and show some pros and cons for each and maybe alternative ingredients that would make the product score higher would be useful as well.
Easy to use. Convenient to scan. Great to have the option to upload new products. Please add the option to search specific ingredients. When I find a sunscreen not in the database I want to know which ingredients are the harmful ones to look out for. And when I scan in products, the database never updates. Never. Ever.
Part 1: I had high hopes for this app, but I'm not as impressed by it as I wanted to be. First, I find their database to be lacking. Sure, you can find most commercial products and information as well as healthier, safer options. However, a lot of the "healthier" options out on the general market and online they are unaware of, so I find myself sending a lot of pics to them, which isn't entirely a bad thing as it helps to expand their database.
It's great when you know the score for the item you scan. Love the app. My ONLY thing is how do we know when the items we've submitted have been entered into the database??? It doesn't notify you when it's been verified.
love this app! for anyone that says their stuff doesn't scan, you might want to try the typing in feature. cameras aren't perfect, package barcodes aren't perfect. 80% or more of anything that doesn't scan is actually there if you type it in.... doesn't take much time people...
I first found EWG as a website and was more than thrilled to discover this app! The only downside I have is with the barcode scanner... I have to hold my phone very still, even breathing will mess it up and unfocus the camera. Other than that, I would love to have this app be my right hand guide for navigating the tricky sickly items in a grocery store
This app is absolutely incredible. It makes it so easy to be an informed consumer, and has shown light (both good and bad) on some of my typical personal care products. I can't wait to continue using this app to improve the products I'm putting in and on my body.
Can't create an account, due to zip code format that only allows numbers. Although you can pick your country from a list, the zip code doesn't adjust to the respective country format (like, for instance, the Canadian alpha numeric codes) and doesn't create a proper profile.
Useless. The 'search products' bar give us no results, whether I put in a brand name or a general category like shampoo. When I browse specific categories, like hair care or makeup, there are no results at all. No idea how anyone gets any use at all out of this app. I did get some results under laundry detergent, so something is there, but nothing under most of the categories I was looking for.
I had a hard time scanning barcodes. App needs to be more fault tolerant. My camera is not great, but the app should allow manual entry of the code. The app is a great idea and for some it works great. Adding manual entry to the app should be simple to do.
Great app that helps us find products that are healthier for us and for the planet. Suggestions: I would love to be able to select and add multiple items to a list in one go; see which items had already added to a list with a heart or star icon; and change the app to show as "EWG Healthy Living" instead of just "Healthy Living" (I keep looking for EWG in my apps list and can't find it. Just "Healthy Living" is too generic.)
good to have but a lot of products are not on the app, browse feature has limited categories of products, a lot of the content available on the website is not accessible on the app. if they add ability to search ingredients, additional items, and quick tip sheets on ingredients to avoid, it would be much better
I'm from the UK and it doesn't have products from Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Boots, Aldi, Waitrose. It does have Lidi stuff so if you shop there it be good. I thinks its more of an american targeted app. The barcode scanner is really slow, esspecially on bottles/curved items. I like the idea and it could be amazing but it's useless to me. It needs more items and to be able to search specific ingredients and brands would be helpful.
Good guide for healthy products, although it doesn't flag natural metals as toxic, if you know what to look for this is a good guide to start learning what's in your products by scanning or searching.
I think the idea of the app is good, but what I really was hoping was to be able to search the ingredients in my own products. As I live in the Netherlands I know the products will be unlikely to be in the database. If I could just scan/enter the ingredients themselves as oppose to the products and see if they are toxic or not then that would be enough. It is limiting for people who live in other countries. Would love to be able to give it a good rating but it's useless for me :(
Great idea, could literally save lives, but as it is now the app is useless. We should at least be able to enter our products in the database. Or save locally, take photos of its ingredients for identification or whatever. Myfitnesspal does something like this and when itens are correctly verified by users a number of times they get revised and receive a seal claiming their info is correct.
Useful but frustrating since the scanner doesn't work on every product. Other than the frustration of the scanner issue, I really do like this app. I use this app along with Ingred which lets you look up ingredients by taking a picture of the ingredients list.
I scanned 12 items and only one item showed information about the product. It could be that this app's database is based on American products. Other than that it's VERY easy to use and shows a lot of info about the product in its information database. I like it that you can add to the database with products that you have at home but show no results.
very neat! the bar code reader works well with good light and holding the phone at tge right distance to get the bar centered and in focus. several tries were sometimes needed to be successful. but in the end it worked just fine.
This app used to be great but it hasn't worked in awhile. Everything I scan including general products from Target and Walmart are not in the system. And the scanner only works half the time. I'll be looking for something better. Very sad.
I've had this for about a week. I scanned almost everything in my bathroom, cleaning closet, even several items while grocery shopping... only one item was found. Idea is great, app is useless. I will be deleting.
Really love that this is now an app. They're still building the system so you may have to take pictures of the products but I think with some group effort this could be a really useful app for a lot of people having issues with autoimmune or health concerns.
This would be fantastic if any of the items I scanned were in the database. The point is to educate, so leaving major brands and products out makes zero sense. Go to any major grocery store and add the products, otherwise this app will always be useless.
I use this app all if the time. The only thing that could make it even cooler is if you could search by characteristics, such as searching by chemical and receiving a list of product that contain such - which would be super helpful to people with various kinds of sensitivies.
Bring back the old app! The new app is horrible. Nothing scans, I open certain categories and their results are blank. Nothing comes up. Categories that I want are not available. It just works terribly. For instance if I search deodorant it says there are no results available. That's just nuts I know there are results in there but they don't show