Nutrition apps – children

Recipes for Kids

Audience: Parent/caregiver

Recipes for Kids is a recipe library.  Parents can amend the recipes to make them more nutritionally balanced or screen the content and only select recipes which are nutritionally balanced and cooked using healthy methods. There is access to videos of some recipes, alongside a lot of advertisements.  Users can add recipes to 'favourites', record a shopping list and search for recipes based on ingredients.

Comment (Frances Arenhold, Registered Dietitian)
This app is just a recipe database. Recipes do not go through a screening process. Majority of recipes are not nutritionally balanced (fish and chips, desserts, meals with no vegetables, fried foods, excess sugar and salt) and only few recipes are clearly targeted at children. There are excessive ads in this app. This App should not be used to source healthy, nutritional balanced, everyday recipes for children.

Safety concerns: The app has the potential to misguide users on what nutritional balanced and healthy meals for children are. Recipes are not screened to determine if they are “healthy” and most are not nutritionally balanced and written recipe structure is hard to follow. Overall, this app has little New Zealand relevance because most of the recipes are from overseas.

Wello: Healthy habits for kids app

Audience: Parent/caregiver

Wello is an app to support parents and caregivers to plan, monitor and assess their child eating and activity patterns. The main aim of the app is to create an eating and activity plan for children which can be monitored. The plan is based on a brief assessment of weight, height, gender, age and food preferences. It includes meals and recipes and progress reports (daily, weekly, monthly and annual).  Other features include online learning on weight management and child nutrition topics for caregivers, ability to add multiple children, track activity and goals as a family. You can track the time, date, meal the child ate for the limited recipe database but not the amount eaten or any additional foods outside of the recipe database.

Comment (Frances Arenhold, Registered Dietitian)
This app should be used with caution as it has potential to cause harm. Although it has a nice look and is intuitive, the assessment is based on limited data and the meal plan solutions are limited for New Zealand users. The tone of the assessment report is abrupt and has the potential to cause unhelpful concern or distress to users.

Safety concerns: The app provides advice based on limited insight into a child’s lifestyle. The tone of the messaging in the app could be detrimental to the child and caregiver on their weight management journey. Users should consult a dietitian or other health professional if they have concerns about their child’s lifestyle. The app has the potential to provide advice based on limited assessment which could misguide caregivers on how to best support their child on the weight management journey.

Cookbook Junior - Kids Recipes

Audience: Parent/caregiver

Easy Recipes for Kids (junior cookbook) is a recipe library collated from other users. There is access to videos of some recipes and ability to flag recipes which are favourites. In addition it has the ability to search for recipes based on ingredients and add ingredients to shopping list.

Comment (Frances Arenhold, Registered Dietitian)

This app should not be used to source healthy, nutritional balanced, everyday recipes for children.

Safety concerns: This app labels and categorises recipes as “healthy” when the ingredients or recipe should not be consumed everyday. This may mislead users to regularly offering foods and meals into children which should only be consumed occasionally and therefore encouraging unbalanced and unhealthy food intake for children.