If you’ve ever made a resolution to try and eat healthier, bookmark this website ASAP! Goodguide.com is a great resource I’ve used to discover healthier foods and beauty products. On Good Guide, you can search hundreds of thousands of products that are rated on a scale of 1-10. The ratings are based on 3 things — the health, environmental and societal impacts of the product. The better the product, the higher the overall rating. A high health rating means there are no ingredients in the product that raise health concerns, a high society rating means the company is committed to engaging in the local community and a high environment rating means there are few adverse environmental impacts associated with the manufacturing and sale of the product.
While you can look up apparel, electronics and even cars on Good Guide, I’ve used it to help me eat healthier. For example, I used to eat Special K cereal for breakfast because I figured if it can give you a slimmer waist as it claims on the box it has to be healthy right? On Good Guide, it was given an overall rating of 5.2 — not as healthy as I thought it would be. Now I’ve switched to eating Cheerios for breakfast, which has a healthier score of 7.1. Good Guide also led me to healthier snacks. I used to snack on Goldfish crackers throughout the day, but after checking their score on Good Guide (4.2), I’ve switched to eating Annie’s Organic Cheddar Bunnies, which I think taste just as good and score higher than Goldfish with a 6.7.
Any health conscious girl knows that what you put on your body is just as important as what you put in it. Good Guide can also help you find healthy beauty products. I recently switched to using more natural beauty products after discovering the products I was using had some pretty harsh ingredients that didn’t do my skin any favors. The Herbal Essences shampoo for long hair that I used to use scored a 5.2. Now I’ve started using Burt’s Bees Super Shiny Grapefruit & Sugar Beet Shampoo, which not only keeps my hair smelling great, but also contains 98% natural ingredients and received a score of 7.8.
Good Guide will not only help you become more health conscious, but also more socially and environmentally responsible, which are two things any collegiette can toast to (with a healthy SkinnyGirl margarita of course).