Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones.

Last week, I mentioned that biking around town hits the climate trifecta (good for wallet + health + planet). So if you want to bike more, try storing your bike somewhere that’s more convenient to access than your car. Then go for a bike ride to get a glazed donut at the new place in town.

Plus, the weekly poll results are in for the unequivocal best bike flair: A lot of you style icons (60 percent!) love the classic whimsy of streamers on the handlebars, while 40% wouldn’t mind staring at someone’s neck hairs while riding tandem. (You can vote on this week’s poll below.)

Today’s edition aims to fortify you in one small way for the week-long potato and in-laws vortex that’s about to happen. G and I go on an adventure to let you know if food-scanning apps are worth the health hype — so read this before you suggest any cooking related swaps with your mother-in-law this Thanksgiving.

As more and more of us start to realize that what’s put in our food isn’t always just food (see the “dirty dozen” chemicals, for example), a lot of food-scanning apps have popped up to help people like me who don’t immediately know what “methylene chloride” means understand what’s good and bad in the food we eat. 

Not to get too tin foil hat on you, but the more we can eat minimally processed foods, the lower our risk of ingesting harmful chemicals — and while it’s virtually impossible to reduce all exposure without only eating granola from a burlap sack, every small choice we make can help our health and improve downstream effects on the environment.

You may have heard of food-scanning apps like EWG’s Healthy Living, Dirty Labs (for cleaning and beauty products), and Yuka. Basically you just scan the barcode of the product you’re curious about and it gives you the cliff notes version of the ingredient list so you know which products to eat and which to avoid.

I like the Yuka app because I recently did a profile of the co-founder and I’m always a fan of someone with a real French accent. And apparently so do 15 million other Americans and 1 in 3 people in France.

When you scan something, Yuka translates all the ingredient label goobledegoop and gives it a score out of 100 and a green, yellow, orange, or red label. The food scoring system is weighted:

I tested out the app a bit this fall just by going through our pantry and vilifying the items G had bought in the distant past that now got a bad rating. (Lay’s, in this household?!) And I chose to ignore the low scores for my favorite food items. (shhhh, you’re safe, Twizzlers.) 

This week, I wanted to test out Yuka in real time to see if the app could actually change my behavior, rather than regretting what we’d already purchased but still eating it anyway.

And since G and I took this week off for a staycation, time felt infinite enough to dedicate an afternoon to strolling the aisles of Wegmans, scanning each and every product without causing a cart traffic jam or being dubbed part of the “slow walker” crowd by passerby with fully formed lists.

So, could our normal grocery haul pass Yuka’s standards?

We each took bets on the final scoring: G put us in the low 60s. Honestly, I’d be happy with a B average. The winner wins absolutely nothing but the definitive pleasure of being the person in the relationship who’s currently more right.

The first thing we started to notice was that the pricey items like Lundberg’s organic basmati rice (100/100) and Late July chips (85/100) were really boosting our score.

This felt kind of like we were cheating at our own game, paying our way into the Ivy Leagues. But the more items we scanned, the better picture I got.

While things like my ride-or-die saltines were getting flattened (29/100), other generic and/or affordable options were still getting A’s and B’s. Shoutout to Tostitos Chunky Mild (78/100) and Mott’s no-sugar-added applesauce (90/100).

Big takeaway: Yes, the expensive, organic products will mostly get higher scores (remember, organic inherently boosts Yuka’s scoring, as does having limited food additives), but there were still a lot of more affordable things we put in our cart that were rated “Excellent.” 

This was a highlight of using the app for me, because it confirmed that I could still get healthy food without bankrupting ourselves at Whole Foods.

Remember those Chewy snack bars our parents used to throw our way after school? And then we learned that they’re basically just sugar oats and sticky molasses? That may have just been my family’s narrative arc, but back to orange slices we went.

So when I found out about Nature’s Bakery fig bars a few years ago, I was ecstatic. A snack bar that’s finally healthy after all these years! It’s from a place called Nature’s Bakery, so how could it not be? Plus the box says real fruit AND whole grains. And the kicker for me: streamlined, lowkey branding with consistent capitalization. An editor’s dream.

Well 😬

33 out of 100!?

Battleship sunk, right in the snacks aisle.

And then the sucker punch: My daily breakfast Rice Chex clocked in at 48/100 (too much sodium, too many additives). G found me on the floor in a pool of tears, scrolling through the recommended alternatives, which included something called heritage flakes and the devil’s favorite - grape nuts.

Big takeaway: Trust no snack bar. Trust no cereal. They’ll only leave you brokenhearted.

Time for the final reveal. But first, let me just work through the agonizing panic of bagging all the groceries and remembering my Wegmans-associated phone number and tapping my credit card in the right spot on the register and making pleasantries about the weather we’re having — all to ensure that the complete stranger behind me doesn’t have to wait even a millisecond after the transaction closes before they start their own process.

G and I tallied our scores in the car, admitting that it’s all a loose estimate because we forgot to scan a bunch of things in the moment, and you can’t really scan produce, and Yuka doesn’t register certain products like cleaning supplies yet. (It does scan beauty products though, if you want to do this whole thing with your skincare routine.)

Our final score: 72/100.

A C minus.

And yes, this does mean G won the bet.

Big takeaway: While I wouldn’t do this whole routine every time we go grocery shopping, it was still super helpful to get more of an awareness around what I’m eating and what is actually within that food. 

If you’re looking to do a ballpark audit of your mainstay food, using an app like Yuka is an easy and free way to do that. Just take its scoring system with a grain of salt (but not two grains of salt because that might get you ding-ed for too much sodium). On the other hand, if you’re looking to make significant changes to your diet, you may get more personalized advice from working with a nutritionist.

I think we’ll make a few tactical swaps but nothing major — after all, for some foods I’m already acutely aware they’re super unhealthy and in fact that’s why I enjoy eating them.

Plus, if we’re grading on a curve here (by which I mean I ate grape nuts for breakfast this morning), that 72% bumps up to like at least an A minus so we’re all good.

🙄 Answer to be revealed next week!