Nov 27, 2013 11:50 AM EST By Jaleesa Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Most people have no clue what their food is actually made up of, but a new hand-held device could help people calculate the calories they're consuming and avoid certain chemicals and food allergens, the New York Daily News reported.

By waving the TellSpec food scanner device over their food, be it a salad or a plate of pasta, user's can find out the chemical, nutrient and ingredient composition of their food in just about 20 seconds, according to the Daily News.

The "magic wand" is a spectrometer scanner that uses a custom algorithm and a companion program on a mobile device to also determine the allergens and calories in the food.

"Light is made up of particles called photons. When you beam the low-powered laser in the TellSpec scanner at the food, some of the photons are absorbed, raising the energy states of the molecules in the food. [The] lower energy photons are then reflected back [to the device]," according to TellSpecs' website. "The spectrometer inside the TellSpec scanner sorts these photons by wavelength and counts them. The resulting numbers, called a spectrum, describe the chemical compounds in the food,"

The device could scan food directly through plastic or glass, which means it can be used to determine the chemical and ingredient composition of a cake behind a bakery window.

Besides identifying the makeup of a food, the app can warn people about allergens like gluten or egg, help people achieve calorie targets and lose weight, and "clarify inaccurately reported food labels.

All the data is then sent to an app on the phone.

The TellSpec device is currently in the prototype stage. The app's developers hope to make the product available to the iOS and Android users by August 2014.

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