In our smartphone-dominant world today, utilizing apps to help us distinguish and locate real food is an easy way to keep healthy foods in our body – whether we’re traveling, out to breakfast, lunch or dinner, or grocery shopping.

No I’m not talking the Angry Birds app, although that would double great for an app name to distinguish factory farmed chicken sources at the store, wouldn’t it?

I’m talking about the apps that can help us find integrity grown/raised real food, identify pesticides, chemicals and GMOs, help us out at the grocery store comparing products and even help save money on food.

There are a lot of apps out there, but I put together my list of the top 10 apps I use that can help you dial in your real food choices for optimal health, vitality & performance.

List:

1.  Non-GMO Project Verified Shopping Guide – free

This app has a list of brands and products that are part of the verified Non-GMO project.   If you’re unfamiliar with GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, check out this in-depth article series by Jeffrey Smith – it’s loaded.

2.  What’s On My Food – free

A Pesticide Action Network (PAN) app, this allows you to identify common chemicals and pesticides found on foods as well as use a searchable pesticide database to learn how dangerous each are.  Thinking about buying those conventionally grown strawberries (soil health: chemical fertilizers / pesticides / 85% loss of symbiotic microorganism population that provides plant nutrition) over the organically grown strawberries (soil health: natural, how Mother Nature has been growing, since, well… growing), use this app to compare the two and decide for yourself.

3.  The Dirty Dozen – free

This app is put out by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) who is famous for putting together their yearly consumer guide lists of the “Dirty Dozen” fruits & vegetables that have the highest pesticide load, as well as their “Clean 15” for the cleanest conventionally grown produce. They also put together consumer guides for healthy home cleaning, sunscreens, safer cell phone use, and more.  If you’re on a budget and can’t buy all organic produce, this app will definitely help you distinguish which produce has the highest & lowest surface/skin pesticide load. Here’s the Apple or Android download.

4.  Find Real Food – $2.99, 6-month subscription

This is a rather new app (April 2014 release) by the Weston A. Price foundation.  Per the Price foundation site:  the app catalogs over 13,000 products spanning 30 categories – including grains, dairy, snack foods and beverages and more – giving shoppers assurance that the foods they purchase are truly nutritious and free of toxic additives and preservatives.

Weston A. Price has a great book I recommend everyone should read (especially if you’re a health or medical professional) called Nutrition & Physical Degeneration.  I have hundreds of books, if not over a thousand books including audiobooks in my library, and this is a top 3 book to put it in perspective.  It’s that important and a must read if you want to understand what foods make people healthy, as well as, when diet is not dialed in, how disease, growth & development disorders and other chronic pathology can be passed down generation after generation.

5.  Locavore – free

This app helps you find which foods are in-season and the farmers market near you that provide them.  I always recommend buying as much real food as possible in-season and from your local farmers market (as well as growing your own food); in other words, becoming a “locavore” yourself.  It’s exactly how we ate a century or so ago to the beginning of human history… remember, the invention of the airplane & commercial refrigeration as two combined technologies used together wasn’t around on a commercial scale until about the 40’s.  That’s what has given us a modern day supermarket, otherwise real food would rot.  70 or so years is a flash in the pan of human genetic history and we’re designed to eat like our ancestors, including eating based on geographical location if you really want to dial your diet in.

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6.  HarvestMark – free

Trace your food back to the farm source… one of the main things I’m always hootin’ and hollerin’ about:  integrity food SOURCE.  Nutshell:  Optimal soil health = optimal plant health = optimal animal health who eats plant (and animals that eat animals) = optimal health in you and I at the top of the food chain that eats both plants and animals.  Food source is important and this app helps track it.

Per the Harvest Mark site:  Today, shoppers expect access to more information about their food than ever before — and they increasingly want it while they shop. They want to know when, where, and how their food was grown, and that it’s safe. The HarvestMark Food Traceability App connects you with the shopper in the store or at home, giving you the ability to deliver this transparency… when and where they want it.

7.  FarmStand – free

Find over 8,700 farmers markets in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia & New Zealand.  When I travel, I use this all the time.

An honorable mention similar, but is not an app, is Local Harvest for the U.S.  Think:  Google for real food.

8.  CleanPlates – free

A searchable healthy restaurant guide for local sourced meats & veggies, vegetarian cuisine, raw foods, gluten-free foods and more. Local, organic, non-GMO & sustainable, you can find your cleanest eats restaurants with ease.

9.  True Food – free

A Center for Food Safety app, this one is another good shopping guide for the supermarket identifying ingredients in foods such as genetically modified organisms (GMO).

10.  HappyCow – $2.99

Vegetarian & vegan restaurant guide.

Even though I’m omnivore for my own diet (that’s what works for me.  Keyword: ME…we’re all unique & different), I use and recommend this app especially for individuals on my ReBoot Body Transformation Protocol.  The first week on protocol is a reset of metabolism, blood sugar, digestion/elimination systems & much more and no solid animal foods are included.  For individuals that need to eat out while staying on protocol (as well as travel throughout the protocol) they can use this app to stay dialed in.

An honorable mention I also recommend for individuals on protocol for seafood is Seafood Watch – an app that helps make sustainable fish choices easy to locate in restaurants and markets (including sushi guides).  Always opt for wild-caught fresh fish over factory-farmed fish… it can be just as bad as factory-farmed cattle:  improper diet (soy pellets for example – fish aren’t designed to eat soy and never have eaten it in evolutionary history. Ever.), drugs, antibiotics, GMOs & more… all of which bio-accumulates in the tissues (the fish meat you then eat and toxicity bio-accumulates in your tissues).  Remember, I’ve said it on Instagram before, you can’t feed a tiger leaves and you can’t feed a giraffe meat.  What happens to a tiger on a diet of leaves?  It gets sick, dis-eased and eventually dies off.  A tiger is not designed to eat leaves, just like fish aren’t designed to eat soy, as the example. All animals (including us) in the Animal Kingdom are designed to eat specific foods for their own biochemical & genetic makeup.

Do you use any of these apps already, or found them useful after discovering them now? 

What are some of your favorite food & health-related apps that weren’t mentioned?