Alpha-gal syndrome is an allergy to a sugar found in most mammals, usually acquired after a tick bite. It means reading labels for mammal-derived ingredients, which is unusually hard, because a great many of them do not say “beef” or “pork” anywhere on the pack.
Most scanner apps have never heard of it. This page says which ones have.
Does the Fig app work for alpha-gal?
Yes. Fig lists Alpha-Gal by name among the diets it supports, alongside Low FODMAP, gluten-free and a stated 2,800-plus other options. Of the apps on this site it is the one built for exactly this problem: a very long list of restrictions, including ones no regulator requires a label to declare.
Fig’s free tier is five scans a month with unlimited searches, which is enough to test whether its answers match what you already know about products you use. There is more detail on the Fig page.
Does Kaibu work for alpha-gal?
Not as a preset, and it would be easy to imply otherwise, so plainly: Kaibu’s “Ingredients to avoid” list covers the fourteen ingredients European labelling law requires to be declared, plus a set of common diets. Alpha-gal is not one of them, and mammal-derived is not a category Kaibu matches on today.
Two things it does do that are still useful here:
- Milk is on the list, which covers part of the ground for those who avoid dairy as well.
- Every ingredient is explained. Tap any ingredient on a product and Kaibu says what it is and what it does in food, free for everyone. For a label carrying “mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids” or “stearic acid”, that is the question you were going to have to look up anyway. Premium adds a reading of that ingredient against the list you saved.
If you want a one-tap answer for alpha-gal specifically, Fig is the honest recommendation today.
The ingredients that hide
Whichever app you use, these are the names worth knowing, because none of them contains the word beef or pork:
- Gelatine, in sweets, marshmallows, some yoghurts and many capsules.
- Lard, tallow, suet and dripping, in pastry, fried foods and some breads.
- Whey, casein, lactose and butterfat, the dairy-derived group, which matters to some people with alpha-gal and not others.
- Stearic acid and magnesium stearate, which may be animal or plant derived and are rarely specified.
- Glycerine or glycerol, same ambiguity.
- Natural flavouring, which is a legal category rather than an ingredient and can conceal a mammal source.
- Carmine, which is an insect colouring rather than a mammal one, and is listed here because it is the one people most often add to this list by mistake.
The pattern is that ambiguity is common: several of these can be either animal or plant derived and the pack will not say. No scanner resolves that, because the record does not contain it either. That is a question for the manufacturer.
What to expect from any of them
Every app here reads a product record rather than the jar in your hand. Recipes change, packs differ between countries, and a field nobody has filled in reads as unknown rather than as absent. In Kaibu an ingredient with nothing on file is shown as exactly that, with a question mark, and never as a tick.
Kaibu is not a medical device and does not give medical, dietary or allergy advice. Label data is crowd-sourced and can be wrong or out of date. Always check the pack, and for anything ambiguous, ask the manufacturer.
There is a broader page on scanning for the ingredients you avoid, and a comparison of the scanner apps.