JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 April 11-17 marks Black Maternal Health Week. The annual campaign founded by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance aims to improve maternal health outcomes among black women who statistically face greater maternal health complications. <\/p>\n
While supermarket barcode apps are common, Erica Bunton\u2019s app, Good Roots, specifically targets pregnant women aiming to ensure that the food they buy is up to nutritional standards. <\/p>\n
While the app is for everyone, she particularly focuses on black women, as they are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. Contributing factors include healthcare quality and underlying conditions. <\/p>\n
>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<<\/a><\/p>\n Good Roots launched on March 1. A user has to scan a barcode of a food product, and the app checks every ingredient against the app\u2019s knowledge base of over 6000 food ingredients. You can also look up products in the app, and it tells you what to look out for based on your stage of pregnancy. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd this one was a seaweed snack, and it got 69 out of 100. And that\u2019s pretty strong for it to be a snack, right?\u201d said Bunton. <\/p>\n The app flags notable ingredients, researched by agencies like the CDC and FDA. It also provides a score on the app based on its nutritional value, among other features. So what happens if a product isn\u2019t listed?<\/p>\n [DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks<\/a>]<\/p>\n \u201cThe more people scan, the more we can put items in the review and add the ingredients of that item to our database,\u201d Bunton added. <\/p>\n Bunton, a Jacksonville native, has a background in medical device and pharmaceutical sales. Bunton says her cofounder, her husband Charles, has a 15-year background in software development.<\/p>\n She was inspired to create the app after having endured two high-risk pregnancies.<\/p>\n \u201cThat experience really taught me that the information is out there, but it\u2019s sometimes and often overlooked because of resources or just not really understanding where to look,\u201d said Bunton.<\/p>\n The CDC highlights that hundreds of women die in the U.S. during pregnancy or in the year after, with thousands more having related challenges. The agency adds that 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. <\/p>\n [SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter<\/a>] <\/p>\n \u201cUnderstanding that a lot of these things can be prevented if we have the knowledge and if we understand the resources that are out there,\u201d said Bunton. <\/p>\n While the app is for everyone, Bunton says there is a target audience that would benefit most from using it. <\/p>\n \u201cThe access to this application is important for black women because we do tend to fall on the risky side of things when it comes to health and when it comes to nutrition,\u201d Bunton explained. <\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here<\/a> to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here<\/a> to stream Action News Jax live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 April 11-17 marks Black Maternal Health Week. The annual campaign founded by the Black Mamas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[982,103668,41670,103669,4475,103670,969,116,118,117,634,646,66799,66805],"class_list":{"0":"post-231928","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jacksonville","8":"tag-action_news","9":"tag-black_maternal_health_week","10":"tag-cdc","11":"tag-erica_button","12":"tag-fda","13":"tag-good_roots","14":"tag-jack","15":"tag-jacksonville","16":"tag-jacksonville-headlines","17":"tag-jacksonville-news","18":"tag-local","19":"tag-phil","20":"tag-zion","21":"tag-zion_dekoto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}