Using Barcodes to Stay Healthy

| Updated on May 3, 2024

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a key component of living a good life. Moreover, when you become conscious of what you are eating, it eliminates any risk of intolerance, allergies, or preservation sensitivities that can pose a risk to your life.

In today’s era, technology has enabled us to track all our nutrition intake directly on our smartphones, through various means, including, scanning of retail barcodes which can be purchased by suppliers, such as https://www.barcodesolutions.co.za/

How Barcodes Enhance Your Lifestyle? 

Barcodes are found on all packaged food and can be noted by their rectangular shape, that is made up of vertical black and white lines of varying widths with a unique number below. 

These are known as linear, or 1-dimensional barcodes and are all based on the UPC-A or EAN-13 standards (for most purposes, these two standards are used interchangeably). Alongside the barcodes, somewhere on the packaging, you will often find a detailed list of ingredients and nutritional information.

Most diet apps these days track our daily nutritional intake to improve the quality of our life. However, due to the prevalence of smartphones, we have come across an easier method to track ingredients, by recognizing and scanning barcodes. 

There are multiple applications that use your smartphone camera to detect the rectangular shape of barcodes and decode them, and, similar to a scanner, bring up information linked to the scanned barcodes.

Major Advantages Offered by Using Barcodes

In this section, we will briefly discuss how barcodes are the future of tomorrow, as it help to ensure efficiency and accuracy while helping you stay fit and healthy.

Tracking Nutrition Intake

A lot of smartphone applications out there have been developed to track the ingredients and nutritional value of products with a simple scan of the EAN barcodes on the product. However, of course, such information will need to first be added to the app, or some other central database that the app can access.

Once aggregated in the database, it allows you to bring up details of any product, by scanning the food’s code directly in the app. The best part is that you can do it, while you are in the store shopping, or once you get home. 

Another benefit to these centralized apps is that such applications create a community that can provide reviews as well as share inspiring new recipes for eating healthy while staying consistent. However, mostly these apps are used to daily count calorie intake.

Increasing Your Knowledge

Barcodes are also used in food applications to provide you with all the information about any harmful substances that could be present in various products. If you want to avoid certain ingredients, such as nuts, dairy, or gluten. Downloading these food applications will immediately let you know which food items to eliminate once the product’s code has been scanned. 

This could be a life-saving technique for some. Especially since these smartphone applications help check whether or not the specific products are environmentally friendly or vegan and what natural products were used in the manufacturing process. 

Authenticating Your Medicines

In healthcare, barcodes help ensure patient safety by improving authenticity, while supporting regulatory compliance. With the advent of smartphones, people can quickly scan these codes on the designated applications to ensure accuracy.

EAN barcodes are unique to the manufacturer and therefore knowing where the barcodes originated, and the journey the product took to get to the shelves, can give you a better understanding of the environmental impact of certain products. That is, assuming such information is available to the public.

Environmentally conscious businesses place these unique barcodes on their products for customers to scan to find out more about their production and manufacturing processes.

These are the few important reasons why barcodes become a beneficial asset for your lifestyle. Wondering how you can get a barcode for your business? Keep reading, to find out!

How to Get a Barcode for Yourself?

Local barcodes company Barcode Solutions which is based in Johannesburg, South Africa has for many years been a supplier of registered barcodes to businesses of all sizes in both manufacturing and retail sectors. 

You can purchase various formats for many purposes. Some formats offered are EAN, UPC, and ITF-14 which are used in the receiving area of major retailers. Find out from your retailer which formats they make use of in their stores, and purchase directly via email. 

Your code will be available to you for life with just a once-off payment and registration. They keep their prices as low as possible to cater to small business owners and entrepreneurs, and you will receive the best customer service that will go above and beyond to tend to all your needs.

Wrapping Up

Barcodes are the backbone of the retail industry, yet people barely, notice them when they go about their daily lives, until they are made aware of these unique barcodes and their purposes. 

But as we can see, paying closer attention to them can bring about a whole world of information – right at the tip of our fingertips. These are a mere few ways in which barcodes are used in the modern world today, they are constantly evolving in many industries not only in retail and food products. 

You can incorporate them into your business in many ways. We look forward to presenting articles on all these ways in which people are using barcodes to streamline their businesses and procedures. 

FAQ

What are the benefits of using barcodes?

Barcodes help ensure the efficiency and accuracy of data, as they eliminate any possibility of human error. Further, they track the nutritional values of your food and medicines, and overall, increase your product knowledge.

How barcode scanning medications is beneficial?

Medicines go through multiple distributors before it reaches the user. This is where barcodes come into play, they help notify the manufacturer about the placement, and movement of their product. Further, helps determine the stock and supply of the individual product.

What are barcodes used for in healthcare?

In the healthcare industry, barcodes are used for multiple things. Such as identifying the patient, and their medical records, inventory management, etc.


Priyam Ghosh

Tech and Internet Writer


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