A HAMPSHIRE firm has launched an app to help people to manage their food allergies.

More than one in five people in the UK either has or believes they have a food intolerance – that’s more than 13 million people.

Choosing the wrong foods can lead to symptoms including bloating and digestion problems, fatigue, depression, headaches and joint pain.

The NHS noted a dramatic rise in food intolerances in recent years, with research showing a 700 percent growth in hospital admissions relating to allergic reactions to food.

Advisr Technologies in Fareham has come up with an app to help.

FoodAdvisr is a free application for Android and Apple smartphone users to help them manage their food choices, finding foods they like and keeping them away foods they need to avoid.

It helps with planning meals, shopping for ingredients and eating out, personalised to people’s specific health needs and lifestyle choices.

The app allows people to set their requirements for allergies, intolerances, dislikes, likes, nutrition levels and lifestyle choices. It then links to a database of over a million recipes, filtered by the user’s detailed, personal settings.

They can then drill down into ingredients and cooking methods, as well as automatically creating shopping lists of ingredients which they can save or share.

FoodAdvisr also allows people to match their food needs to their grocery choices and instantly make sense of the complex information on food products.

Users can enter a particular food (eg: ‘pizza’, ‘chicken curry’ or ‘bread’) and see all food products in that search, matched against their settings.

Items can be added to their shopping list with the click of a button.

Alternatively, people can scan the barcode of a product and find out if it meets their settings.

User can make food choices and shopping lists before going out, or use the scan function to check foods in their fridges and cupboards, or while they’re in a shop. The data stored covers many leading consumer brands, as well as own brand products from Asda, Co-Op, Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose to date.

FoodAdvisr also allows customers to search for restaurants by location, and explore menus and dishes in participating restaurants, instantly highlighting what they can and can’t eat based on their profile settings.

Kieran Lees, co-founder and CEO of Advisr Technologies, says: “Our vision is simple: to give people the ability to make accurate, informed choices about their food, based on their personal needs, preferences or lifestyle. The awareness of food-related health issues, including allergies, intolerances, diabetes, obesity and many other medical conditions, is rising dramatically. Legislation is helping to ensure that food operators provide information, but there is currently very little help available to the consumer to simply match their needs to the food they’re buying. FoodAdvisr automates this, providing a simple to use, very powerful and accurate way for people to match to make informed choices.”