A Free Nutrition Tool for You and Your Students

This free nutrition tool is perfect for anyone interested in nutrition or healthy living.

Fooducate is one of the best tools out there for health and wellness. Their app even won 1st prize in the US Surgeon General Healthy App Challenge. If you or your students are interested in learning about the calorie content of food or beverages, this tool is for you.

Fooducate – A free nutrition tool to use in your classroom.

What's great about Fooducate is it goes beyond mere calorie counting, educating students on the quality of the calories in a particular item. Take for example an orange and a serving of M & Ms. While both items have high sugar content, the orange receives an “A” rating while the M & Ms receive a “D” rating. You can see the orange receives credit for being natural, having no added sugar, and naturally high in vitamins. On the other hand, the M & Ms receive poor marks for being highly processed, containing a large amount of added sugar, and controversial food coloring. (Mr. TWW, please pay attention to this paragraph!)

The site and the free app will also provide alternative choices while viewing an item. This makes it easy to evaluate alternatives and learn what might be a better or worse choice to what you've selected, and why.

Another helpful feature of this app is the barcode scanner. With the camera on your smartphone or tablet, you can scan an item's barcode. Fooducate will pull up the item and give all the additional nutritional information, along with helpful analysis. This is perfect for a class field trip to the grocery store, or you could create your own mini-grocery store in your classroom (bring in a few items yourself, or have students bring in a couple items from home to evaluate).

All in all, I highly recommend integrating Fooducate into your next lesson on healthy living. Enjoy!

Kimber Thompson is a Lead Moderator for SimpleK12 webinars and a Contributing Editor for SimpleK12.com. She writes frequently about education topics, and is passionate about tools and techniques that inspire young learners. You may reach her with ideas and comments at editor@simplek12.com.