Question 1

Is Healthy Squirrel free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The food diary and dashboard are free forever, with no account required to start. An optional Pro tier is $5.99/month or $64.99/year and removes the weekly limits on photo and barcode scans.

Question 2

Does it track vitamins and minerals, not just calories?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Healthy Squirrel fills in all 52 nutrients on every food automatically — energy, the three macros, 14 vitamins, 13 minerals and 9 amino acids. You never type a vitamin or mineral value by hand.

Question 3

Do I need to create an account?

Accepted Answer

No. Guest mode works with no sign-up and keeps everything in your browser. If you sign in later, your guest data carries across. Sign-in is passwordless — a one-time code is emailed to you.

Question 4

Where does the nutrition data come from?

Accepted Answer

From USDA FoodData Central (lab-analyzed whole foods) and Open Food Facts (barcoded packaged products). Daily targets use the Mifflin–St Jeor equation plus NIH/Institute of Medicine reference intakes. Missing nutrients are shown as missing, never invented.

Question 5

Is my data private?

Accepted Answer

Yes. There are no ads and your data is never sold. In guest mode nothing leaves your browser. With an account, data is isolated per user with row-level security, and you can export or delete everything at any time.

Question 6

How is it different from MyFitnessPal or Cronometer?

Accepted Answer

MyFitnessPal's free tier doesn't show vitamins or minerals (they require a paid Premium plan); Healthy Squirrel shows them free with no account needed to start. Cronometer offers the deepest micronutrient data but its free tier runs ads, requires an account, and can feel complex; Healthy Squirrel is the simpler, ad-free, no-signup alternative.

Question 7

What's the best free app for tracking vitamins and minerals?

Accepted Answer

It depends 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 catalogue, but its free tier doesn't show vitamins or minerals at all. 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.

Question 8

How do I track micronutrients without paying for a subscription?

Accepted Answer

Three things matter more than which app you pick. 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. Log whole foods where you can: a lab-analyzed entry for carrots carries all 52 nutrients, while a restaurant dish often carries four. And read your intake as a weekly average rather than a daily score, because vitamin and mineral intake is naturally spiky day to day.

Question 9

Which nutrition trackers work without creating an account?

Accepted Answer

Very few — most require a sign-up before they show you anything. Healthy Squirrel has a guest mode that works with no sign-up at all: the diary lives in your browser's local storage and nothing is sent anywhere, and you can look a food up on the home page without any account. If you sign in later, the guest data carries across rather than being discarded.

Question 10

How do I find out which nutrients I'm low on?

Accepted Answer

Food logging shows what you are eating, which is a different question from what is in your blood — a real deficiency is diagnosed with a blood test, not an app. What a diary is 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 often 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. A persistent gap is worth taking to a doctor or dietitian.

Question 11

Do you have to count calories to eat better?

Accepted Answer

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 are short of and eating more of the foods that close the gap, which is a more additive habit and for many people a more sustainable one than restriction. Any tracker that shows micronutrients can be used this way.

Per 100 g	Spinach	Kale
Energy	23 kcal	35 kcal
Protein	2.9 g	2.9 g
Carbohydrates	3.6 g	4.4 g
Total Fat	0.4 g	1.5 g
Saturated Fatlimit	0.1 g	0.2 g
Fiber	2.2 g	4.1 g
Sugars	0.4 g	1 g
Sodiumlimit	79 mg	53 mg
Calcium	99 mg	254 mg
Iron	2.7 mg	1.6 mg
Magnesium	79 mg	33 mg
Potassium	558 mg	348 mg
Zinc	0.5 mg	0.4 mg
Vitamin A	469 mcg	241 mcg
Vitamin C	28 mg	93 mg
Vitamin D	0 mcg	0 mcg
Vitamin B12	0 mcg	0 mcg
Folate	194 mcg	62 mcg

Spinach vs Kale

Where Spinach wins

Where Kale wins