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6A Daily News – Monday, December 5, 2011 Vitality & health (MCT) RALEIGH, N.C. — Gatorade drinkers wondering about the calcium pantothenate in their favorite sports drink won't have to guess much longer. INRFOOD, a mobile application and website created by a group of Durham, N.C., startups, will allow users to scan the bar codes of food products and see the ingredients. The application will launch by the end of November and is the brainchild of Jaargon, a health care startup in the American Tobacco Cam- pus' American Under- ground complex. "With health care, we need to get back to basics," said Jaargon CEO Keval Mehta. "One of the prob- lems is that we don't look at the components of food, the ingredients. We're educat- ing users on what this stuff is, where it comes from." The application, which has data on more than 200,000 products and 40,000 ingredients, lets users scan the bar codes of packaged foods through their iPhone camera or online via their webcam. The application then loads information on the product, providing facts on what the ingredients are used for and where they come from. The platform also color codes ingredients as red, yellow or green based on their nutritional value and includes special codes for medical considerations such as pregnancy and allergies or cultural prefer- ences. "If I scan a box of JELL- O, the gelatin in there is not vegetarian-friendly, and a little alarm will go off and tell me it's not suitable for me," said Mehta, a vegetar- ian. The application will also offer product recall infor- mation, he said. Though the mobile application is free, features including the color-coding, cultural and medical con- siderations and recall infor- mation disappear after 30 days. Users can pay a one- time fee of $2.99 for the full version and lifetime updates. "We want to price it where it's quite attractive What are you eating? Mobile app can tell you ly. Many studies have looked at the correlation between marriage and health, and a recent study found that marriage may affect survival after coronary artery bypass surgery. The study was published in the Journal of Health Psychology in August, and found that people who were married when they had heart surgery were 2.5 times more likely to be alive 15 years later than unmarried people. Surprisingly, it appeared that marital status was a better predictor of long-term survival after bypass surgery than other well-known risk fac- tors such as smoking, high blood pressure, dia- betes, and prior heart attacks. While only 36 percent of unmarried men still MCT photo A new phone app by Jaargon will inform you of a food recall.The INRFOOD app uses data on more than 200,000 products and 40,000 ingredients, and it can provide alerts for medical or cultural considerations. and affordable to most peo- ple," Mehta said. He hopes to have as many as 1,000 downloads a day of the application in the first two months, with at least half of them converting to the paid version. Work on INRFOOD started in April, when Mehta and his team began recruiting five other Ameri- can Underground startups to help develop and design the application. Jaargon sought out dieticians and nutritionists to assist with the ingredient coding. Two Toasters, a startup that builds mobile products, built the iPhone application and helped develop the database needed to process all the search queries, CEO Rachit Shukoa said. "It needed to be very easy to use, so someone who may not be as techno- logically adept would still be able to pick up the appli- cation and know exactly what to do," he said. "I'm a huge foodie, and learning more about what I was con- suming really made me think this was an interesting concept and one that hasn't been done in the mobile space." Shukoa said working with the other startups, which include Smashing Boxes, Appuware and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development, was also a unique opportunity because his co-developers were eas- ily accessible in the Ameri- can Underground. The complex is a center designed to house entrepre- neurial ventures, which typ- ically have few employees. Jaargon, for example, has seven employees. . "Overall I'm excited to see the project get in front of the users," he said. "That's the true test." Mehta said the applica- tion is marketed toward women ages 18-38 but is designed for everyone to use. The application devel- opment team was com- posed of 20 men and one female, and the platform made the biggest difference in the eating habits of the men, he said. "Men are not really our target demographic, because they just eat what they want, but pretty much anybody who has a mobile device we'd like to target," he said. "Our application's not going to be pink or any- thing like that, but it's really geared toward female users." Ryan Sobus, a registered dietitian with Healthy Diets in Raleigh, N.C., said she would likely recommend the application to her patients if the ingredient guidelines matched her own. "People respond very well to the color-coding because it's instantaneous feedback on whether some- thing is good or not," she said. "If that helps people to put down the potato chips and pick up an apple, then I'm a fan." Several nutrition-based applications already exist. Fooducate, a free applica- tion that similarly allows users to scan a product bar code, gives foods a letter grade based on their ingre- dients and nutritional value. FoodScanner, an application by Daily Burn, allows its downloaders to scan a bar code and keep track of how many calories they eat. The app costs 99 cents. But Mehta said his focus on ingredients is what will distinguish INRFOOD from its competitors. "If you scan a Twinkie and you see what's in a Twinkie and you still want to eat it, more power to you," he said. "But don't say you didn't know." were alive 15 years after surgery, 83 percent of the men who said they were highly satisfied with their marriage survived. Other findings from the study showed that happier marriages tended to have more health benefits than unhappier ones. Of note, however, women appeared to have less of a survival bene- fit with marriage than men in the study — although the decreased sample size for women vs. men in the study may have made that hard to analyze. Marriage also appears to have an impact on other health conditions, and some other studies have shown: • Decreased alcohol and drug use among mar- ried people. • Reduced depression and increased socializa- tion among married people. • Reduced risk of nursing home admission, reduced nursing home costs and overall reduced health care costs in married persons. • No change in tobacco smoking with mar- riage, and interestingly enough, less marijuana use in married men but no such difference in women. • An increase of weight in both men and women with marriage, and a decrease in physi- cal activity for married men. Studies on marriage are difficult to conduct, and they do not take into account the health sta- tus prior to marriage. There also appears to be a difference in health effects based on gender, and the nature of the marriage — happy vs. unhappy. It appears that the positive benefits of mar- riage on health represent a combination of the selection of healthier people into marriage and true health benefits from marriage. The studies on marriage should be applicable to any long- term relationship. So, marriage appears to be mostly good for your health, especially if it is a happy marriage. But you may need to get out and exercise to pre- vent the extra marital pounds from accumulat- ing. Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden are medical directors of Sutter Downtown Integrative Medicine program in Sacramento, Calif. Have a question related to alternative medicine? Email adrenaline@sacbee.com. Running economy may not decline with age, a study finds (MCT) — Older run- ners may not have the speed of their younger counterparts, but they do have the same running economy, a study finds. Running economy is a gauge of how efficiently the body uses oxygen at a given pace. Researchers used various tests to see how age affects factors of running economy in com- petitive distance runners. The 51 male and female participants in the study were sub-elite dis- tance runners who were grouped by age: younger runners ages 18 to 39, master runners ages 40 to 59, and older runners ages 60 and older. They were put through a number of tests, including lactate threshold (a measure of performance level), VO2 K W I K K U T S Family Hair Salon Every Wednesday December 7, 14, 21 & 28 Pine Street Plaza 332 Pine Street, Suite G Red Bluff, CA Stacy L. Garcia Hearing Aid Dispenser Lic. #7440 (800) 843-4271 $200 REGULAR HAIRCUT off with coupon Not good with other offers 1064 South Main St., Red Bluff • 529-3540 Reg. $13.95 Expires 12/31/11 max (which gauges maxi- mum oxygen consump- tion), body composition, muscle strength and endurance, running econ- omy, flexibility and verti- cal jump power. Running economy was about the same for all groups at various tread- mill speeds. Results from the other tests gave a bet- ter idea of where older NOW OPEN FINDERS Thrift & Antiques Tue-Sat: 10am-5pm In the Frontier Village Shopping Center 645 Antelope Blvd. 530 527-7798 James W. Tysinger, Jr. M.D. Eye Physician & Surgeon Fellow American Academy of Ophthalmology We accept Medical, Medicare & most Insurances Office Hours: Tues-Wed-Thurs 8am-4:30pm Mon & Fri 1pm-4:30pm For Emergencies, After Hours, Week-ends, Call 530-567-5001 345 Hickory St. Red Bluff Tel: (530) 529-4733 Fax: (530) 529-1114 runners fell short. Older runners had lower VO2 max com- pared with master and younger runners. They also had less upper body strength. While this may not seem crucial for run- ners, whose lower bodies do most of the work, hav- ing a stronger upper body makes it easier to change speeds and run uphill. KEEPERS Flexibility was worse too in older runners. This can affect step length, the authors noted, ultimately slowing running times. The good news is that older runners are still using oxygen efficiently, even if they're not always outrunning younger run- ners. "For the runners over age 60, it's physio- logically more difficult to run at that speed, even though the absolute oxy- gen uptake value is the same as a younger run- ner," lead author Timo- thy Quinn, an associate professor of exercise sci- ence at the University of New Hampshire said in a news release. The study was published recently in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Oak Street Barber Shop Holiday Savings Jr. High & High School Students New Winter Hours 8:30-5:00 Mon.-Fri. 9:00-1:00 Sat. Call for after hour appts. call 527-8111 or 736-7462 335 Oak St. Home of the best haircuts for the best value! $10 w/student body card $11.00 Regular Cuts $9.00 Seniors fitness Marriage seems to be good for your health, well-being Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden McClatchy Newspapers Marriage may be good for your health. Most-