Collaboration

MacHead22

MyFitnessPal should collaborate with Yuka, that would be a fantastic pairing of two great apps. If you don’t know what Yuka is go check it out. Some Doctor’s got together and put this app together to help people make better food choices, it scans barcodes and gives you a 0-100 Bad,Poor,Good,Excellent on additives and preservatives hazardous chemicals in the products, of the words we don’t know and understand and can’t spell. They help make it easier for us to choose. I myself try to eat my food above 50. The best part. The app is free. They do ask for donations though, but they did all the homework/heavy lifting for me. I’m okay with giving a few dollars.

Alatariel75

 of the words we don’t know and understand and can’t spell

I'm immediately suspicious of anyone or anything that tells you to what to eat according to your educational level.

AnnPT77

I can see how some would enjoy that integration, but I have some reservations about it personally. IMO, while there are some ingredients everyone would be best off to avoid (such as artificial trans fats), whether a food choice is reasonable or not is often a matter of context and dosage.

The Yuka web site says this:

Nutritional quality is 60% of the score.

The calculation method is based on Nutri-Score, a science-based nutrition label adopted by 7 European countries that measures the nutritional balance of food products, taking into account the indicated quantity of sugar, sodium, saturated fat, calories, protein, fiber, as well as the fruits and vegetables content (calculated or estimated).

IMO, nutritional quality may be relevant to a totality of a person's way of eating, but it can mislead when it comes to individual foods. If I eat a cookie high in sugar and calories but devoid of veggies/fruits and other good nutrients, it doesn't cancel out the broccoli and berries I had in a larger quantity earlier in the day. Endurance athletes - even recreational endurance athletes - for best health and performance may even need to eat some foods that are nearly pure added sugar during long training sessions. In that context, pure sugar is a good choice.

I'm not against MFP pursuing integration with the product, but I feel concern that something like that can give people a warm fuzzy feeling because of high scores, without their really developing a more nuanced understanding of overall eating patterns that's IMO the real key to health and fitness.

Outsourcing decisions to apps, generically speaking, has some down-sides. In general, I already avoid/minimize many of the things you're talking about as negatives, even though I am mostly able to understand and pronounce the ingredients' names. Honestly, it's pretty easy to look at an ingredient list, and prefer food products that use ingredients I'd use if making that food in my own kitchen, not applying any specialized knowledge of additives.

I can see somewhat more value in the scoring for cosmetics, because most of us have less personal experience with formulating those, so we don't necessarily know the names of the more benign ingredients.