Simple Nutrition Insights

What If Your Cart Could Quietly Reverse Chronic Disease?

• Leonila • Season 2 • Episode 37

Share episode

Send us a text

We explore how clear data, simple habits, and dietitian guidance can cut through grocery aisle confusion and help people make faster, healthier choices. Galen Karlan-Mason from GreenChoice shares new findings on ultra-processed foods, why retailers matter, and how personalization empowers every shopper.

• founding spark in the egg aisle and the problem with label claims
• upbringing, athletics and the path to building transparent food data
• how the GreenChoice score and app work across four health pillars
• support for allergies, celiac disease and diabetes through filters
• sobering stats on highly processed foods by category and retailer
• shopper trends toward fewer additives and more ingredient clarity
• a three-step label reading method that saves time
• the role of dietitians, personalization and shelf-level tools
• AI, wearables and the future of real-time nutrition guidance
• community and family dynamics that make change stick
• practical staples and what’s next for GreenChoice

Go check it out. It’s an incredible resource for anyone who wants to eat well and shop with confidence.


Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to this podcast and share with a friend. If you would like to know more about my services, please message at fueledbyleo@gmail.com

My YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0SqBP44jMNYSzlcJjOKJdg

SPEAKER_03:

Welcome back to Simple Nutrition Insights. I'm your host, Leonila Campos, registered dietitian and founder of Fueled by Leo. On this show, we dive into practical, evidence-based conversations to help you make nutrition simple, enjoyable, and sustainable. Today I'm excited to introduce Galen, the founder of Green Choice, a platform that's helping millions of people make healthier, more sustainable grocery decisions. Galen has a really unique background. He's a former college athlete, helped revive his family's food business, and is now leading the change in bringing transparency to the grocery industry through science-backed product data. His company has helped shoppers make millions of better for you choices and shown that when c consumers have their information, they actually change what ends up in their cards. Galen, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Leonilla. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so let's start from the beginning. What inspired you to create green choice? Was there a moment when you realized the grocery shopping experience needed to change?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, there was a moment. It actually came in the egg aisle. I I was so tired of reading these claims on the packaging only to Google them and then find out that they didn't actually mean what any normal person would think they meant. And that experience in the egg section was reflective of an experience I was having in most aisles of the grocery store. I was a grad student in time in Boston. And I, as you mentioned, I had been a college athlete, but I wasn't playing sports anymore. And I was thinking about food's impact on my health in a new way at that time. I was trying to be more conscious, not just think about food as fuel, but okay, as medicine. How can I navigate this out? I'm grocery shopping for the first time for myself in a consistent way. And I also had a bunch of food allergies. I'd I'd developed, I've had allergies since I was a little kid and developed new ones as I got older. And so I had to read every ingredient list to just make sure it wouldn't harm me or depending on the allergen, kill me. So doing all of that to try and navigate that decision was pretty overwhelming. And I would spend far too long in the grocery store. And as I started talking to more and more people, I found that this was a very common experience. And most people are trying to make healthy choices for themselves. Regardless of what politicians or media might say, most people want to be healthy. And when you really sit down and talk to people, you find that there's a there's a challenge to figuring out how to do that. You have budget constraints, you have time constraints, you have the tyranny of choice, the thousands of serials to pick from. And we went after that problem to say there's data and research out there. I had access to academics and scientists in Boston and set out to basically solve my problem and make it easier. And that's that's how Green Choice began.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, that's an amazing um story because I do see that, you know, as a dietitian with my clients, you know, when they come to me, they come because they're confused, right? And they may, maybe they struggle for quite a quite some time before they decide, okay, maybe I need to find somebody to help me figure this out. And um this the grocery store can be overwhelming. For example, I I might have a patient that has diabetes, right? And they're looking at the food labels for carbohydrates or added sugars, and they're they're frustrated because they don't want to spend two hours at the grocery store just to get a few things, right? So it's great that you know you were faced with a problem, right? But you you went beyond that and you were like, let's find a solution, not just for me, right? But maybe for the other people that are struggling to Yeah, you mentioned diabetes.

SPEAKER_00:

And as a registered dietitian, I mean, I'm sure you you've set out to solve similar types of challenges as as we have, but you look at our country and we are chronically ill. I mean, seven of the top 10 causes of death are diet-related. You know, you have just extremely high obesity, you have so much diet-related chronic disease. And it starts with the food that we're putting in our body, but it's not easy to make these choices. And, you know, we've done a lot of work analyzing food's health impacts and assessing what's in the grocery store aisle. And it is not surprising when you look at the the products that are on the shelves that we are where we are as a country as it relates to our health. And growing up with a lot of people in my family and community with chronic health issues, it was pretty clear that what we're eating and the way that we have been living is not the way forward.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Yeah. And a change needs to happen, right? Um, but also the education, it's important in just giving the consumers, right, the public, the tools, right, to be able to do that. Which is absolutely also important. You were once a college athlete, as you mentioned, right? And later helped revive your family's food business. How did these experiences shape your approach to health and transparency in food?

SPEAKER_00:

So I'd actually go further back in time to how I grew up. So I from a little town in southern Vermont and have two parents that I consider former hippies. My dad was an environmental science professor, and my mom a school therapist. And my mom was, my dad would preach, we vote with our dollars, whether it's shutting the lights off or recycling, like these little choices add up. And when we all do it as a society, it moves the needle. It makes a huge difference. And then my mom was very mindful about what food she was buying for us and the foods that she, from a psychological standpoint, right? Because she studied psychology, uh, was really mindful around how food impacted our mind, not just our physical health, and was very intentional about not letting a lot of additives and added sugar come into the foods that we had in our home. And so, you know, at the time, I was like very frustrated by it as a little kid. I just wanted to eat lunchables and fruit loops like my friends. But, you know, fast forward a couple of decades later, as I was having that grocery shopping experience I just described, struggling to figure out what's what in the aisle. Even with that upbringing, I wasn't able to navigate it. So, you know, you ask, how did my experience inform? It really one trained me to think consciously about these choices, but it didn't necessarily equip me to navigate a thousand protein and snack bars and all the claims that they're making. And so that's been a learning journey and working with the scientists, experts like yourself, nutrition scientists, dietitians, environmental scientists, data scientists to really build out an app and now a company that is all about helping shoppers easily find and identify foods that meet their health needs and goals.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. And you kind of mentioned this already, right? But for those who are new to green choice, can you describe what it is and how it actually helps people shop smarter?

SPEAKER_00:

So we analyze foods, dietary and health impacts. We have analyzed over a million foods now. We evaluate them and how they meet different dietary needs. We also power an evidence-based food health score from one to 100. So think of this as an indicator of the food's healthfulness for you. It's color-coded traffic light style. So, like green is good, red means you should limit this, yellow in the middle. These scores and this information are accessible to you in a couple different ways. So, one, we have a free food scanner app. This you can use to scan a food's barcode and immediately see its score, as well as healthy swaps available to you. And then you can build your own dietary profile. So, in addition to the score and these recommended swaps you can make, you can actually set your own preferences. Like I don't want any artificial food dyes, or I'm following a keto diet, or I'm avoiding added sugar. And then those preferences are all applied as filters to the recommendations we give to you and to you as you search for products. And you can scan a food and immediately see green check, does it match? Or red X, does it conflict with your preferences? So take, for example, added sugar. We see 60 plus different names for added sugars in our grocery aisle. I don't know all of them off the top of my head. I wouldn't expect anyone else to. You can set a preference like no added sugar and now scan and search foods by that preference and immediately find foods that that match. So that's the app experience. But we also take our scores and our data and provide it to retailers, to grocery stores, so that they can create the same empowered, personalized, transparent shopping experience in their store for you, whether you have the app or not. So you can see our scores on the shelf tags of our partner's site, partners' stores. You can see that on their sites or in their app so that you don't even have to go anywhere else. Right in that experience, you can see those scores. You can build your dietary profile and get personalized recommendations and a curated shopping experience. Because if you've ever gone into the store and you're following a diet, it can be a nightmare. If you go online, it's often not that much better, but there's an opportunity to make it much easier. And so we integrate into the grocery store shopping experience to make it a better experience for the shopper and help the retailer make it make it more, much more pleasant for their shoppers to navigate their store.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that it's it's like a win-win situation, right? Obviously, a huge win for the consumer, but also for the retailer, right? Because it's like targeted and they're also getting benefit benefits out of that. This is amazing because, you know, when I think about my most complex cases, right, where like maybe I have a patient that has celiac disease, right? A gluten allergy, and they're and then more like sensitivities or intolerances to like other foods, right? It can be really, really tough for them to shop. And I've hear this often, like, what am I gonna eat, right? Like air, water? Because there's not, you know, they're having a such a hard time going to the the grocery store and finding something again without spending so much time um and not just being so limited, right, to to essentially what's available. So that's really yeah, that's really nice. As soon as you start talking, like it just went to the Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's just just echoing your your sentiment here that as somebody who's allergic to almonds and hazelnuts and has a gluten sensitivity, I completely understand that feeling of like, oh my God, this is such a pain. What am I supposed to eat? Where do I start? Where do I find these things? And what we found is that people with dietary restrictions actually, when you empower them with an experience that makes it easy to find foods that match, they actually are often become some of the most exploratory eaters out there that they're excited to try new foods that fit with their preferences or health goals and are really trying new items and foods and meals and combinations more than many other shoppers, but they need a way to make it easy. And certainly that's part of the story that we're sharing with grocery stores.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, awesome. Amazing. I have a really interesting question. What's one of the most surprising insights you've uncovered from studying so many food products, something that maybe even changed the way that you shop?

SPEAKER_00:

So we just completed an analysis of over 660,000 foods sold in the US across 50 of the largest national and regional retailers. And we looked at food processing and the level of processing in our grocery aisles across these 660,000 plus products. And some of the stats and findings were surprising and very sobering. I'll share a couple. So 32% of all products in the US food supply are highly processed, with at least 11 or 12% qualifying as ultra processed. But when you look at specific categories and retailers, the story gets far more concerning and interesting. So take bread and bakery. So within the bread and baker category, 67% of products are highly processed. They get an average processing score of 42 out of 100. In frozen food, 60% of frozen foods and 45% of snacks and dips. So depending on that category, you are running into highly processed foods the majority of the time. And I'll go one step further to say depending on that subcategory of foods, like take breakfast with baked goods, for example, 85% are highly processed. Take frozen meals, 73% are highly processed. Highly processed foods are abundant and extremely prevalent in our grocery stores. But when we then started to look at retailer-specific catalogs, we got a whole new layer of understanding. So if you look at a Whole Foods or a Sprouts market, so large national natural foods stores, about fifteen percent of their catalog is highly processed.

SPEAKER_02:

While fifty to sixty percent is minimally processed. If you look at the conventional retailers, so the krogers of the world, you're looking at three times the percent of highly processed foods, forty to fifty percent, and a third or so of their store being minimally processed.

SPEAKER_00:

So think about like this: when you go into uh a Whole Foods, you are three times less likely to encounter a highly processed food than when you go into the average conventional retailer. And so the set of decisions that you need to make to navigate that store and make healthy choices are a lot more complex. Just by default of being in a natural retailer, you're gonna come into contact with much less processed food. And we thought that was really, really interesting because certainly not all of this country has access or the budget to be able to afford to shop at a store like Whole Foods or Sprouts.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Yeah. And this is where it could be a debate, right? It could be a concern. Um the availability of food, obviously the affordability of the foods essentially, right, that are going to nourish us better. Um, and I'm sure this is could be probably a whole different episode, right? But I think, you know, even just the consumers, right, and the public having information right on their hands, what's and and I think also right understanding what is process, what is ultra process, just letting the consumers know what that is. So they they have that information. But I think having something like what you have created, right, provides that information, decision making at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, so you've had a front row seat of millions of grocery decisions. What trends have you noticed among shoppers who are trying to eat healthier or more sustainably?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. This is a great question. I would say we've seen a few things.

SPEAKER_00:

One is a shift towards less processed foods, a desire that is growing across the economic spectrum, across the political spectrum, to know what's in our food and to avoid artificial food dyes, artificial ingredients, added sugars, to try and find better few alternatives. Historically, this was in many cases localized to urban environments, coastal cities, higher median household income communities. But that is no longer the case. What we're seeing is it's not a demographic that cares about health or is trying to make conscious choices. It is a psychographic. And that psychographic is bridging a lot of these, these groups, these demographics that historically we have have been left behind and have been left behind by our policymakers. So I think that's one big shift. You know, looking at how people engage with our app, one of the most, the most engaged piece of our food green score is the processing score. So, you know, people want to know not just like, is this nutrit nutritionally dense, but they want to understand, are these ingredients safe for me? And that's been a big shift that we've seen over the last year or so.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, amazing. And giving the consumers more power, right, to make those decisions too. For someone listening who may maybe feel overwhelmed in the grocery aisle, think of like when you were in that egg aisle by labels, claims, and marketing. What advice will you give to simplify the process and make more confident food choices?

SPEAKER_00:

I like this question a lot. Candidly, I still get overwhelmed, right? So I don't want to give, I don't want to give listeners the impression that I step into the grocery store and I'm having an easy time of it. I do use our app all the time when I shop. I'm scanning stuff all the time. When I want to try new foods, I'm scanning it. So, you know, one answer would be the Green Choice Food Scanner app is free to use. I would recommend that you use it. I think you'll find a wealth of information, but you'll also find that it makes it pretty easy to compare options without needing to do a ton of research. That said.

SPEAKER_02:

Outside of that, I think my advice would probably follow three steps. It would start by saying by pausing.

SPEAKER_00:

And rather than just taking the product that looks the most appetizing or is like calling to your hunger and your human desires for something that is sweet or fatty or salty, which calls all of us, by the way, it's in our DNA. I would say pause, turn the pack over, turn the package over. And probably, you know, I've talked to a lot of dietitians and friends, you know, scientists in the space. I think probably my advice would be turn the pack over, check sugar, look at sodium, saturated fat content. And then look at the serving size and ask yourself: does that serving size match what you'll eat, or is it less than what you eat or more than what you eat? Often you'll find it's maybe what you're gonna eat or a lot less than. And so take that percent daily value of sugar, saturated fat, sodium, and based on that, say, does this make sense? Right? Like, how do you feel about getting what it's saying you're gonna get in this single serving? And then probably the second step I would say is look at the ingredients, read them. Is the list long? Are there things you don't recognize on that list? And if there are, they might be fine for you. They might totally be fine for you, but it'd be worth a Google. It'd be worth a quick chat with uh GPT or whoever you chat with. There's a lot of resources there. And I and I think that's probably the steps I would take. So turn the package over, check a few key pieces of the nutrition facts panel. Definitely look at the serving size and then look at the ingredient list and just say, is there anything I don't recognize here?

SPEAKER_03:

Yep. Awesome. Almost like I do.

SPEAKER_00:

You're the you're the dice.

SPEAKER_03:

You did really good. It's like what I teach, right? Like turn the package over, look at your serving size, look at your your nutrients, right? Nutrition facts label, read ingredients list, right? You can definitely find so much information about a product on the ingredients list.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I'll just note that the lens that I answering in is really more from an angle of thinking about foods that you might want to limit. Obviously, I didn't mention targeting healthful ingredients or you know, nutrients to encourage that that we want, like fiber and protein, and all the good vitamins. And so obviously this gets complicated. And that's that's part of what we aim to solve with Green Choice.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. The food industry is changing so fast. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation, especially when it comes to helping consumers make informed, healthier choices?

SPEAKER_00:

There needs to be a lot more transparency than there is today. Our work is certainly one piece of bringing that transparency. It can't just be from the outside, though. We really believe that, you know, it's it's great to have an app like Green Choice that you can use to scan foods, but it's gotta be embedded into the shopping journey. For every person that's gonna download an app and take the time to scan foods, there are many more people that will not. And they deserve access to this information too. And so it's gotta be, from our perspective, embedded into that point of decision when you're in the grocery store or when you're shopping online for groceries. I believe that they're that food, a food score, like our food green score, is an important piece of the puzzle to simplify it. It's not the whole puzzle, though. I think retailers can benefit tremendously from making registered dietitians accessible to their shoppers. You know, they spend year, you spend years studying uh how not just nutrition science, but how to engage and guide people with medical nutrition therapy to make these choices and make healthy swaps and navigate what is complex and personalized. And to that end, I think there needs to be a lot more personalization. So, you know, people's health needs are vary, people's dietary restrictions vary, people have different chronic diseases, and food has the power to reverse, to prevent, reverse, curb essentially all of these chronic diseases that are plaguing our country today. And so tailored shopping lists, tailored recipes, tailored meal kits, and plans are all opportunities, I believe, to move the population to a much healthier place and also to create a far better experience for most Americans who are shopping.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Thank you so much. Actually, you know, um really uh appreciative for the shout-out to, you know, on dietitians and the work that we do. Uh sometimes it's not yeah, it's not um seen right, which comes back to the education aspect of it. But I I love the idea of like just you know, food industry or retailers partnering with dietitians. And and there's there's a few, right, that that do already, and they utilize our skills to create recipes and to create content, right? And educational materials, which is wonderful. So yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to hopefully that being a huge change in the next few years. Do you think AI and data transparency will change the way we grocery shop in the next few years?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

AI is this incredible tool. I spend a lot of time in Cloud and Chat GPT for a mix of things I'm working on. I'm in it for one reason or another every day. That said, it is still the Wild West when it comes to health and nutrition information. There's a lot of hallucinations, meaning information that's gonna the response is gonna sound very accurate and definitive, but it can be completely wrong, is what we find, or very misinforming. And so I'd say right now, there is it's very I would be I would not recommend that people go to these chat services for their nutrition and health advice. I would say it is an incredible resource to learn more and to assist in your research about foods or ingredients or health issues that you're having. But it's a starting place and it needs to be fact-checked. And I'd say I saw, you know, recently I saw over 50% of the citations in GPT go to Wikipedia or Reddit currently.

SPEAKER_01:

So take that for what it is.

SPEAKER_02:

I will say looking at the looking at wearables.

SPEAKER_00:

So I have a whoop on right now, and there's we're getting so good at tracking these markers of health that I believe soon we'll see this translating into, and we already are starting to see this translate into personalized dietary guidance and food guidance. And really starting to understand how does food real time impact our body and based on our particular markers at any given time, what's the right foods for us to be eating to for optimal health from a performance standpoint for athletes, but also to curb chronic illnesses.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Yeah, amazing. I love that. And we'll continue to see changes right on that as well. And if you could have a magic wand and fix one thing about the current food system, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00:

I was asked this recently, and the answer for me is what's on our shelves. As we talked about earlier, there is a lot of stuff on our shelves that is perpetuating chronic illness and health inequity. And while transparency and personalization are critical to helping people get access to the information they need to make better choices, you can also create a choice environment that is easier for shoppers. I don't believe that means less choice, but I do believe it means simpler, more healthful, clean foods on the shelf. And big companies die slowly. It takes a long time for a multi-billion dollar CPG corporation to disappear. And so if I could wave a wand, I would accelerate the transition to better-for-you foods because all of those large companies, the Kraft Heinz, the PepsiCos, the Coca-Cola's, the general mills of the world, that are producing many foods that fit a decade ago, two decades ago, but also are part of the problem today. They're also investing in much cleaner foods. They're acquiring companies that are doing this better, that are innovating with ingredients to create amazing tastes with far less additives that are far more nutritious for us. And so if I could weigh that wand, I would just accelerate the whole transition because it's happening. The big guys know it. We as consumers know it. We're voting with our dollars. I just want it to happen today.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Yeah, that would be amazing. Uh, I'm with you on that for sure. You build a community of health focused followers and still growing, right? How important is that sense of community when it comes to driving change in how we eat and shop?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, food is so communal that and so culturally dependent. And the more That we have people around us that are also engaging in this journey, the easier it becomes. And I'll share an anecdote on this front. I was just listening to, I was at a conference in DC the other day on the future of health. And there was a panelist who had, she was diabetic and she was enrolled in a food as medicine program where they would give her a prescription to go purchase. And actually she was she was receiving foods, boxed like produce subscription, and she had a prescription that she could go use to purchase healthy foods at the grocery store. And it was incredibly effective. 12 weeks, it it had it had an amazing impact on her. She lost weight, she reversed indicators of her diabetes. And she spoke so highly of this experience. But one of the things that she shared that really took me aback and surprised me. And it's and it's obvious when you hear it, was how challenging that transition was because of her husband's diet. That her husband wasn't on this program, but they would eat their meals together. And he was still, in many respects, trying to eat the way that had gotten her in the place that she was chronically ill. And it was actually in cooking those meals for the two of them and bringing him along that she was able to really see the results she did. And he started to feel better. But after the end of the program, he very quickly went back to wanting his burgers and fries and pizza and made it very, very difficult for her to maintain those habits that she had formed over the 12 weeks. And so I say all that to say the people around us, you know, we are the average of the five people around us. That's true in a lot of respects. I think it's often true in what's on our plates as well. And if we can take this on and share this journey and ask inquisitive questions of the people around us and what they're eating, I believe it makes it ultimately a lot easier for everybody and everybody can benefit.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I love that so much because I see that with my clients too. You know, this struggle of number one, starting, but continuing, right? If there's a family involved, because it's not only they're not only cooking for themselves, right? They're cooking for the entire family or trying to make so many meals, right, for everybody. And it gets overwhelming, right? There's it's time consuming. Um, and so our environment, right, plays a huge role for sure, and like our success to continuing to do something, even if we're building sustainable changes, right? There there is a point where you're like, is this even worth it? Because I'm even two times more stress. So I agree with you 100% that um making that change as a whole, right, not only benefits the person that's doing it, right, but the entire family.

SPEAKER_00:

A small note on that, having been a little kid in a household where my mom, I would give her credit, was very effective at bringing us all along in this. She dealt with us saying, Mom, why can't we have lunchables? Mom, why can't we get the white bread? Why do we have to eat this toll grain stuff all the time? I mean, she heard this from us all the time. And one, I think there was an element of like, she just stuck to it. You know, she was will like she was, she was not, it was not a negotiation. And she was, you know, there was, we would get treats sometimes, and that was that was great. But, you know, on this, this was like a principle. This was a matter of her principle, and she wasn't gonna budge on it. And so, you know, when you take that out of the equation, I think one, kids just start to get it. You know, we're not in the we might say, why can't we? But there's no tantrum. We're not throwing a fit, we're not going in the grocery store pulling off lucky charms, thinking that we're gonna get it in the shopping cart and creating creating a scene in the aisle, right? So that was one piece. And I really credit her with sticking to it like that. The second piece is that kids are smart. Kids are smart. And I don't have children yet. I do have goddaughters and I love them to death, and they're difficult too. Kids are smart and they're difficult. But if you see some of my friends who are parents really have very real conversations with their children. They treat them, you know, for the very intelligent beings that they are at 10 years old or at eight years old. And they explain why we're not gonna get that food, but we're gonna get this food instead. And I think you can do it in a way like you have to be mindful. You don't want to be overly restrictive. Obviously, eating disorders are extremely real, and you need to create a healthy relationship with food with your children. So that's where I think you as a dietitian would have better advice to give. But I think there's an opportunity to bring your kid into the conversation and have your kid be excited about finding foods that that are healthy for them because they want to show up with good energy at school. They want to do well in sports, they want to be healthy too.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Yeah, absolutely. It is absolutely correct. And they're able to they're exploring, right? They're trying to understand the world. And so when we do give them the information that they need to understand that decision, right, it does empower them to be like, okay, that makes sense. And then they move forward.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Like I know kids that are like eight, nine years old. That's like now they understand that if they eat too much sugar, they're going to get cranky and crash. They're gonna get a bunch of energy, but then they're gonna crash. And so then when you remind them of that, they're like, oh yeah. And they understand why the and and they might not be able to make the the decision completely for themselves, but they're able to understand where it's coming from and it becomes much more collaborative than uh than not.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Yeah, most definitely. Okay, on a personal note, what are some of your favorite green choice approved staples you always keep in your kitchen?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, first we should define green choice approved. I would probably mark that as like a good or great choice item. So on our scale of we actually didn't really talk about how we score foods. Foods are scored from one to 100 across four science-based industry standards. So we look at nutritional quality, ingredient processing, ingredient safety, and climate footprint. And each item is scored for each one of those four dimensions. And so you can compare items on any one of those four dimensions, or just the average of those four is called the green score. So items 75 and up are considered good or great choice.

SPEAKER_02:

Items are the green choices that you'd see in the store or in the app when you scan foods.

SPEAKER_00:

I okay, I'll give you something that's in my my freezer right now, which is a a sweet snack that I love, is the trufu, I think it's true fuzen, you know, fresh frozen berries that are like dipped in chocolate. And if you can go with the dark chocolate ones, um, you know, they they they really are actually pretty simple ingredients. It taste incredible because you have the sweetness from the strawberry or the raspberry coming through. You don't need really that much added sugar in the chocolate. And uh the pretty pretty healthy, really tasty dessert. So that would probably be my call-out today.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, and before we wrap up, what's next for green choice? Any exciting developments or collaborations we should keep an eye out for?

SPEAKER_00:

So we've now analyzed and scored over a million foods and counting that are available in the US today. So we're gonna continue adding to our database and adding to what you can scan and search on the Green Choice app, adding dietary preferences to support different health issues and needs and be able to filter items based on your particular needs. So the list is long already. I'd say check it out in the app. Probably we can support your needs. But if we can't, there's gonna be new needs coming and you can always request more. So that's one. So the app's gonna continue to get better. The other piece is that we're we're we're really excited about the food is medicine movement and healthcare providers, payers, I should say, rather, funding scripts, food prescriptions, healthy benefit cards, OTC cards that you as a member of your health plan can go use to purchase healthy foods at the grocery store. Because when what they find is that the costs, you know, are a third of the cost to when when you can actually move someone's diet and prevent the illness rather than treating the illness. And right now we have sick care, not health care. And so we're doing more and more work in helping make sure that those healthy benefits are going to more and more healthy foods in the aisle without restricting people's freedom of choice. And so I'm very excited to take our technology, our app and our data, and make it easy for you as a healthy benefit cardholder to be able to purchase foods that are great for you and feel like it's really easy to do that.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, awesome. I love that. And I look forward to seeing that and hearing more of that success for sure. Galen, this was such a great conversation. Thank you for sharing your time, expertise, and passion for helping people make smarter grocery decisions. For all of you listening, if you want to learn more about Green Choice, I'll link their website and social channels in the show notes. Go check it out. It's an incredible resource for anyone who wants to eat well and shop with confidence. Any final thoughts that you might have? Anything else that you would like to share?

SPEAKER_00:

Leave listeners with this. We are what we eat. There's no better time than today to start asking what's in your food. And it has the power to nourish you and this planet. And I encourage you to encourage you on your journey because it's a journey.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you so much. Thank you by there. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in into Simple Nutrition Insights. Until next time, stay fueled, stay curious, and take good care of yourself. Bye bye for now.