GoodGuide: Healthy Grocery Shopping Assistant

You're being duped by clever marketing.

Or so says Dara O'Rourke, professor and founder of GoodGuide, a year-old website that rates the products you buy–based on how they influence your health, the environment and society–on a scale of 1 to 10.

The site harnesses more than a decade of the U.C. Berkeley professor's research to help consumers navigate the supermarket (an increasingly tricky task).

And now there's GoodGuide to go: A new iPhone app lets users scan bar codes at the grocery store and receive instant feedback. No iPhone? There's a text-messaging option, too.

Of the 60,000-plus products and companies currently in the GoodGuide database, about 11,000 are related to food. But that number is quickly growing: O'Rourke and his team add about 1,000 items a week. The goal is to get to 70,000, which should encompass every product in your basic grocery store.

Next, GoodGuide will go social: "We now want to bring in more user content," says O'Rourke. In the next few months, you'll be able to share products, tag favorites and read other users' reviews.