You have heard of plenty of different food and nutrition apps that track eating habits and count calories, such as FitBit, RunKeeper, and MyFitnessPal, as well as dozens of other similar apps available in the app store. But have you heard of Sage? If not, it’s about time you did.
Sage goes beyond the traditional food labels to give you a better understanding of what you are eating, and where it came from. Ever wondered how many miles you’d have to run to burn off the calories of that yummy chocolate bar? How have far those raspberries traveled to finally make it to your plate? Sage can answer these types of questions for you.
Sage’s company mission was summarized nicely by the chief information officer at Whole Foods: “Customers want a better understanding of how a product is sourced, the quality standards behind it, whether the labor that made it was paid a fair wage, its impact on the environment…This is a way to give them all that information that isn’t captured on the nutrition label.”
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One of the features Sage app does is to tell you where the product is sourced or made. For instance, if you were curious where those Driscoll’s raspberries were grown, you can search in the Sage app and find that your specific batch came from Mexico, etc.
Sage will also identify any possible allergens in particular foods. Take, for example, the Beast Burger, a meatless burger product sold at Whole Foods. If you search the Beast Burger in the Sage app, it will show you that the product contains possible allergens of corn and seeds, as well as a detailed list and explanation of all of the ingredients in the product. Most importantly, it will tell you why each ingredient is added to your food, so you can know exactly what you are putting in your mouth.
Sage can also give you a nutritional snapshot of any food product. For example, if you enter a brand of Gummi Bears into the app, it will tell you all of the added sugars and other additives that may be hiding behind the nutrition label, but it will also let you know whether or not it is a viable source of Vitamin C, calcium, etc.
One of the most important aspects of this app, however, is its ability to tailor daily nutritional requirements to each user’s different dimensions, weight, height, and lifestyle. For example, Sage may recommend 3,300 calories for daily intake for Mr. Slover, a middle-aged athlete, whereas Sage may only recommend 1,800 calories for daily intake for his mother, who is much smaller in stature, older in age, and more sedentary.
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This kind of individual nutritional guideline is extremely important for proper nutrition and health; currently, the nutritional label on a food product will only tell you its nutritional values based off of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ 2,000 daily calorie diet. As we know, we as a human species are not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ group of beings, so having a more accurate representation of our individual daily nutritional needs and values based on our own individual characteristics is incredibly important.
One of the biggest draws of this particular nutrition app is, however, its ability to tell you how far or how much exercise would be needed to burn off the calories of individual foods. Using fun, animated, cartoon characters – such as a bike riding watermelon or a pear doing yoga – Sage will let you know just how much exercise is required to work off that chocolate bar or that bag of chips. So, for example, to burn off that bag of chips, Sage might recommend either 25 minutes of jumping rope, or 18 minutes of running, or 90 minutes of yoga, etc. Of course, these answers will be different for everyone, because Sage bases this numbers off of your height, weight, lifestyle, etc.
Article Curated from:
New York Times Health
