Frequently asked questions

Yes. The food diary and dashboard are free forever, with no account required to start. Optional Pro is $5.99/month or $59.99/year, and it pays for the parts that cost real money to run at volume, plus the tools built on top of them:

• Printable nutrient reports to share with a doctor, dietitian or coach
• Photo logging with no weekly cap, scan every meal (fair-use daily limit)
• Unlimited barcode scanning
• Adaptive burn, your energy target self-corrects from your real trend

A weekly recap email is built but not switched on yet, so it isn’t part of what you’re paying for today.

Yes, in beta. Coach is $30 per player per year, with a minimum of 8 players (from $240 a year). A coach makes a team under Team in the app and gives players the code. Players join with it and keep their own private accounts. Billing, and Pro for the roster, are arranged by email while Coach is in beta.

What a coach sees: the name each player chose, and for the last 7 days they logged, their average % of target for protein, carbs, fiber, iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamin D and potassium. Never the diary, weight or calories; the database refuses to store anything else. A player can leave at any time, and their summary is deleted. Every player needs to be 16 or older.

Coming to Coach, and not part of the price until it ships:

• Custom targets by player or position

Yes, that's the point. Healthy Squirrel fills in all 52 nutrients on every food automatically: energy, the macros, 14 vitamins, 13 minerals and 9 amino acids. You never type a vitamin or mineral value by hand. The dashboard shows the 27 that most people act on and keeps the rest (amino acids and the trace minerals) one tap away in the full breakdown, so it stays readable without hiding anything.

No. Guest mode works with no sign-up and keeps everything in your browser. If you decide to sign in later, your guest data carries across rather than disappearing. Signing in takes an email address and a password.

Two public, traceable sources: USDA FoodData Central (government nutrient data for whole foods) and Open Food Facts (barcoded packaged products). Daily targets are computed from the Mifflin–St Jeor energy equation plus NIH / Institute of Medicine reference intakes (RDA/AI), with age-banded upper limits. If a nutrient isn't in the source data, it's shown as missing rather than invented.

Yes. There are no ads and your data is never sold. In guest mode your diary stays in your browser. With an account, your data is isolated per user with database row-level security, and you can export your diary (CSV or JSON) or delete your entire account with one click at any time. If you join a coach’s team, the coach sees only the name you chose and your weekly % of target for a few nutrients. The privacy policy lists everyone else who handles data.

Yes. Barcode scanning uses your phone camera on-device and looks the product up in Open Food Facts. Photo logging identifies foods from a picture, and voice logging turns a meal you describe into foods. A free account gets 5 photo scans, 10 voice or typed meal logs and 10 barcode scans per rolling 7 days. Pro removes the weekly limits. Photo and voice logging still have a fair-use daily limit on every plan, well above normal use.

Any modern browser. Healthy Squirrel is an installable progressive web app (PWA): add it to your home screen and it works offline on phone and desktop, with optional background reminders, no app-store download.

MyFitnessPal is built around calories and macros: its free tier shows some vitamin and mineral values on individual foods, with fuller nutrient tracking in Premium. Cronometer’s free account tracks vitamins and minerals in more depth than either of us, but needs an account and runs ads. Healthy Squirrel’s difference is focus: no account to start, no ads, targets adjusted for your training, and food suggestions that close the gaps it finds. See the full comparison.

It depends on what you need. Cronometer has the deepest micronutrient database of the mainstream trackers and is the right answer if you want lab-grade detail and don't mind ads and an account on the free tier. MyFitnessPal has the biggest branded-food catalog, but it is built around calories and macros, with fuller nutrient tracking in Premium. Healthy Squirrel is the option to look at if you want all 52 nutrients free, with no ads and no account: it fills them in automatically from USDA FoodData Central and Open Food Facts, and shows a nutrient as missing rather than guessing when the source data doesn't have it.

Three things matter more than the app you pick. First, use a tracker whose numbers come from a public database (USDA FoodData Central for whole foods, Open Food Facts for packaged ones) rather than crowd-typed entries, which are usually complete for calories and empty for everything else. Second, log whole foods where you can: a USDA entry for "carrots, raw" carries all 52 nutrients, while a restaurant dish often carries four. Third, read your intake as a weekly average, not a daily score. Vitamin and mineral intake is naturally spiky day to day, and a single low day means nothing.

Very few. Most require a sign-up before they'll show you anything, because the account is the product. Healthy Squirrel has a guest mode that works with no sign-up at all: the diary lives in your browser's local storage and is never sent to us. You can also look a food up on the home page without any account whatsoever. If you later decide to sign in, the guest data carries across rather than being discarded.

From food logging you can only see what you're eating, which is a different question from what's in your blood. A real deficiency is diagnosed with a blood test, not an app. What a diary is genuinely good for is spotting a consistent dietary gap: log a normal week, then compare the weekly average against the reference intakes for your age and sex. The nutrients that most commonly come up short in Western diets are fiber, potassium, magnesium, vitamin D, calcium, and, for people eating little or no meat, iron, B12 and zinc. If a gap persists, that's the thing to take to a doctor or dietitian.

No. Calorie counting answers one question, how much, and says nothing about whether the food carried the vitamins, minerals and fiber you needed. Tracking nutrient adequacy instead means asking what you're short of and eating more of the foods that close the gap, which is a more additive habit and, for a lot of people, a more sustainable one than restriction. Any tracker that shows micronutrients can be used this way; it mostly means paying attention to the bars that are low rather than the number at the top.

No. Healthy Squirrel is an educational food diary, not a medical device. Nutrition data always carries some error, so it shouldn't be relied on where precision has clinical consequences, for example carbohydrate counting for insulin dosing. Talk to a qualified professional for personalized guidance.