Frequently Asked Questions

It helps you track how much of a chosen trace element — nickel by default — you take in through food each day, and compare your daily total against a limit you set. It's designed for people following a restricted diet who want to spot high-content foods and watch for patterns over time.

The app ships set up for nickel, the element with the most complete built-in food data. You can change the tracked element in Settings → Tracked Element. Each element keeps its own set of food values, so switching gives you a clean, element-specific database to build on.

No account, ever. The app works fully offline using its built-in food list. A connection is only used if you choose to look up a food that isn't already in your database (see privacy).

Food reference values are stored as micrograms (µg) of the element per 100 grams of food. When you log an amount, the app scales that figure to what you actually ate. For example, a food listed at 500 µg/100g, eaten as a 30 g serving, contributes 500 × 30 ÷ 100 = 150 µg to your day.

Earlier builds listed a separate row per country — for example cashews (Spain) and cashews (USA, national) — which made the list long and hard to read. Each food is now a single entry whose value is a weighted average of every measurement in the source data across all regions. Trace-element content still varies with soil, cultivar, and processing, so if you know a figure that fits what you ate better, you can edit it yourself in Food Management (see Can I correct or add a value? below).

Treat them as ballpark guidance, not lab results. They are population-level estimates; the actual content of any single serving varies with origin, cultivar, soil, processing, and preparation. They're meant to help you compare foods and notice patterns, not to certify an exact intake.

Yes. In Food Management, type the food name, enter a number in the Value (µg/100g) field, and tap Save to DB. Your value is stored locally for the element you're tracking and used everywhere that food appears.

A compound food is a dish made of several ingredients — like a sandwich or a burger. The app holds a recipe of ingredient names and standard portions, looks up each ingredient's value, and sums them into the dish total. You can also build your own in My Recipes and adjust portions or swap ingredients to lower the total. For a cooked dish that isn't in any recipe list, tick Prepared dish — look up ingredients online when logging it and the app pulls its typical ingredients from TheMealDB to estimate a total you review before saving. Ingredients it can't price locally fall back to a USDA lookup, and any still missing a value are kept and flagged — so you can price them all in one pass or fill them in yourself, and nothing is silently dropped. See the User Guide.

Yes, both. On the My Recipes screen, the export button saves your custom recipes to a single shareable file and import loads someone else's — imported recipes are added without overwriting your own. And in any meal card's header, the copy icon pulls that same meal from the day before into today, one meal at a time. See the User Guide.

By default the day turns amber (caution) at 80% of your limit and red (over) at 100%. Both thresholds are adjustable in Settings.

Yes — all three live in Settings: the Daily Limit, the Caution threshold (percent of the limit for amber), and the Over-limit threshold (percent for red). Set them to match the targets your clinician or diet plan uses.

Yes. On the Trends & History screen, the PDF icon exports a report for a date range you choose — each day's total and status, its mood and note, and every food logged — that you can save or share, handy to bring to a clinic visit. You can also create a full data backup file in Settings → Backup & Restore.

Your daily logs and food database live on your device. Nothing is uploaded to any server operated by the app's developer. The only network requests are optional lookups you trigger yourself: the USDA FoodData Central lookup goes directly to USDA's public API, the in-app web lookup queries Google, and the prepared-dish lookup sends a dish name to TheMealDB's public recipe API. These happen only when you search for a food or dish that isn't already in your local database, and only the search term is sent.

Nickel-in-food values are adapted from the Rebelytics R&D Inc. low-nickel-diet dataset, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Values were taken from the published summary tables, normalised to µg per 100 g, and mapped to ingredient names for offline lookup. No Rebelytics-branded interface, scoring system, or clinical guidance is reproduced. Optional supplementary lookups use USDA FoodData Central, which is public domain in the United States.

On the old device, open Settings → Back up to file… and save the file somewhere you can reach later (such as Google Drive). On the new device, install the app and use Settings → Restore from file… to load it. Note that restoring replaces any data already in the app on the new device.

No. Trace Elements is a self-tracking tool, not a medical professional or device. It does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition, and nothing it shows constitutes medical advice.

It estimates how much of a chosen trace element is in foods you log, so you can look for patterns in your own response and manage symptoms in collaboration with a clinician. Reference values are population-level estimates and the actual content of any serving will vary.

If you are following a restricted diet because a clinician advised it, follow their guidance over the app's numbers. If your symptoms change or worsen, contact your healthcare provider.