Beyond Calories and Macros
For decades, fast food nutrition has been focused on tracking calories, fats, and carbohydrates. However, recognizing the impact of ultra-processed food requires tracking physical ingredients, not just macronutrients.
Ultra-processed foods now account for 50 percent of adult calories and over 60 percent of children's diets in the United States.
The Scope of Unknown Additives
While European regulations limit legal food ingredients to approximately 400 substances, estimates for the US food supply range between 4,000 and 10,000 ingredients.
A primary driver of this discrepancy is the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) classification, which allows companies to self-affirm the safety of new additives without a formal FDA petition.
Consequently, thousands of modern additives have entered the US food supply without public tracking or exhaustive long-term human outcome data.
How You Can Take Control
You do not have to wait for legislative changes to understand the composition of your meals.
By using transparency tools to view digitized menus, you can identify exactly which additives are present in fast-food items and make informed choices for your health.
PRūF bridges the gap by directly extracting data from public restaurant disclosures and mapping it to the menu items you order, empowering you to see exactly what you are eating.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because of the 1958 GRAS provision, food manufacturers can bypass formal pre-market FDA review by having a panel of industry experts declare a new substance as Generally Recognized as Safe.
Both are created in laboratories. "Natural flavors" must be derived from a plant or animal source, while "artificial flavors" are synthesized from other chemicals. Both can contain dozens of proprietary chemical sub-ingredients.