Deciding what or when to eat and drink has always been controlled by human impulses. But now..

Know your food and go beyond the label to make sure you make the right choices when it comes to eating. Forget reading labels; take your handheld scanner that uses spectroscopy to measure what is in your food.

What’s in my food?

Many foods contain chemicals and allergens that you want to avoid, but it can be difficult to know whether these are in your food. Food labels can give us some information, but they’re not always intelligible and some ingredients may not even be reported.

Three components

TellSpec tells you which allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients are in your food before you buy it, order it, or eat it. Spectroscopy is combined with bioinformatics and deep-learning algorithms to analyse consumer foods at the molecular level. The system has three components: a pocket-sized scanner to capture the spectrum of the food, a unique algorithm to analyse the data, and an app to report the findings on your smartphone or computing device. With each scan, the database grows and becomes more accurate.

 

Pros and cons

Biggest pro: The system allows everyone to make better choices. It is a godsend for people with an allergy or intolerance.

Biggest con: Are you going to be able to make the right choices when your battery is dead?
 

 

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