As a consumer, you are making the critical choices that impact the health of everyone you are feeding: children, parents, wards, extended family, friends, neighbors and community members, and not the least yourself. If you bring a dish to a potluck at the community center or you invite your whole family over for Sunday dinner, you can improve their diets with your shopping choices. The Smile Food System gives you a health rating for every packaged food, primarily in an effort to help you select food items with significant levels of fiber and protein content and insignificant levels of sugars. Moreover, as you put foods together into meals, you can combine foods that are smiles, fiber grins, and protein grins, producing a full-smile meal when the recipe as a whole is assessed on the fiber-sugar-graph. If you lean toward food items that are rated as smiles, fiber grins, and protein grins, you will be creating a pantry from which your family and friends will be eating a balanced and nutritious diet on a daily basis because those are the only choices available to them at home. You will also know when foods are fiber frowns and protein frowns, flat-faces, and full frowns, so you can be sure to limit those when a more optimal option is available as a replacement, and you can keep those food products at a limited supply in your pantry. Finally, frown foods can be provided for your loved ones as occasional desserts, sweets, and treats, so people can balance their diets in a way that also celebrates the sweetness of foods, special cultural treats, and the good life!
You can use the Smile Food System app when you are shopping and selecting food products from the shelves. The app helps you assess the nutrition value of the food and compare competing alternatives. You can pick the alternative with the health rating that suggests high levels of nutritious food ingredients with meaningful levels of fiber and protein and low levels of sugar. You can use the app when you are shopping on line. The on-line “store” will provide the Nutrition Facts Table in the product details. If you have a lot of food in your home pantry, cupboards, and shelves, you can take a second look at them with the app and put them into categories of smile, half-smiles, and frowns, so you can re-assess your shopping when it is time to replace them, find alternatives, and re-stock your shelves.
When you are shopping with someone else, a spouse, partner, parent, or child, one of the team can be using the app to find the health rating of products before they are plopped into your cart. You can work as a super-savvy, shopping team to pick out foods that will help you follow a balanced, nutritious diet.