What gets tracked
Every diary entry carries fiber, sugar and sodium alongside its calories and macros — those three are stored on the entry itself. Foods with richer label data carry fifteen more: added sugar, the fat breakdown (saturated, trans, mono- and polyunsaturated), cholesterol, potassium, calcium, iron, vitamins A, C and D, magnesium, phosphorus and zinc.
Eighteen in total, and that number is the whole list: every nutrient with a card in Insights, a row in a food's breakdown, and a goal you can set is one of those eighteen.
A food's detail shows its full breakdown in a collapsible section. For your own custom foods it appears once you've entered micronutrient values — a blank there means "not entered", and the app is careful not to display absent data as zeros.
Your Insights turn all of it into trends: 23 cards in total — calories, protein, carbs and fat, then water and the eighteen above — each with its history over time.
Floor, target, ceiling
A nutrient goal is up to three independent lines:
- a floor — the minimum worth reaching (fiber, potassium…);
- a target — the point to aim at;
- a ceiling — the level to stay under (sodium, added sugar…).
Anatomy of a nutrient goal
Not every nutrient uses all three, and two use none at all. Out of the box every goal runs on Auto, derived from your age, your sex and your calorie target, and updating as those change. The editor shows today's computed value right on the Auto option, so you always know what you would be switching away from.
The Auto values
This is what Auto sets, for a 35-year-old on a 2,000 kcal target. Where men and women differ, both are shown.
| Nutrient | Floor | Target | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fiber (g) | 25 | 28 | — |
| Sugar (g) | — | — | 90 |
| Added sugar (g) | — | — | 50 |
| Sodium (mg) | — | 2,000 | 2,300 |
| Saturated fat (g) | — | — | 22 |
| Trans fat (g) | — | — | 2 |
| Cholesterol (mg) | — | — | 300 |
| Potassium (mg) | — | 3,400 M · 2,600 W | — |
| Calcium (mg) | 800 | 1,000 | 2,500 |
| Iron (mg) | 6 M · 8.1 W | 8 M · 18 W | 45 |
| Vitamin C (mg) | 75 M · 60 W | 90 M · 75 W | 2,000 |
| Vitamin D (IU) | 400 | 600 | 4,000 |
| Vitamin A (IU) | 2,083 M · 1,667 W | 3,000 M · 2,333 W | 10,000 |
| Magnesium (mg) | 350 M · 265 W | 420 M · 320 W | — |
| Phosphorus (mg) | 580 | 700 | 4,000 |
| Zinc (mg) | 9.4 M · 6.8 W | 11 M · 8 W | 40 |
| Monounsaturated fat | — | — | — |
| Polyunsaturated fat | — | — | — |
Three things worth reading off that table:
Only four of the eighteen move with your calories — fiber's target, added sugar, saturated fat and trans fat, all defined as a share of your energy. The other fourteen depend on age and sex only, so a change to your calorie target leaves them exactly where they were.
Mono- and polyunsaturated fat have no Auto goal at all. Not a floor, not a target, not a ceiling. Their cards show what you ate and nothing to judge it against, because there is no reference intake worth defaulting anyone to.
Some values shift with age. Calcium's floor rises and its ceiling drops from 51; vitamin D's target goes to 800 from 71; phosphorus' ceiling drops to 3,000 at the same age; magnesium steps up at 31; iron drops for women after 51.
The floors are set at the point where the evidence says most people fall short, the targets at the recommended intake, and the ceilings at the upper limit or guideline cap — drawn from the NIH and NASEM dietary reference intakes, the USDA guidelines, the WHO and the NHS. The full sourcing is on the citations page.
Changing a goal
The goals live one level deeper than you might expect. From Insights, open the nutrient's card, and on its detail screen tap the target icon in the header. That button only exists for the eighteen nutrients above — calories, the three macros and water don't have goals in this sense, and don't draw a floor-to-ceiling band on their charts.
From there, Goals shows the goal currently in force plus any others in your history, and opens an editor where you can set:
- Goal Type — Auto (we set and keep updating it), Custom (your own numbers), or None (the nutrient stops showing targets or ranges entirely).
- Each of the three lines separately. Floor, target and ceiling each get their own section, and each can be Custom or None on its own. A ceiling-only sodium goal with no floor and no target is a perfectly normal thing to want.
- Goal Start Date. This is the part most people miss: a goal isn't "from now on". You choose the date it starts from, so you can backdate one, and every chart resolves the goal that was in force on the day it's drawing. Your history keeps the goals it was actually lived under.
You can delete a goal too; affected days fall back to the previous goal, or to Auto if there isn't one. And if you enter numbers out of order the app tells you — the expected order is floor ≤ target ≤ ceiling — but it doesn't stop you, because there are legitimate reasons to want an odd shape.
An honest caveat
Micronutrient totals are only as complete as the labels behind your foods — a day of generic entries will understate zinc long before it understates calories. That is why fiber, sugar and sodium, which sit on every entry, read far more reliably than the fifteen that depend on a food having extended label data.
The app doesn't paper over the gap: where a food has no figure for a nutrient, its contributors list marks it No data rather than counting it as a zero, so a low day reads as "we don't know" instead of a false "you ate none".
Treat micro trends as directional, and the label scanner as the way to make your staples precise.