User Guide

1. First run & choosing your element

Out of the box the app tracks nickel with a daily limit of 150 µg, a common target for a low-nickel diet. You can change the limit at any time — see Settings. The element you track is shown under the daily ring, and every food value in the app is interpreted as that element measured in micrograms (µg) per 100 grams of food.

With Trace Elements Pro you can also track cobalt. Cobalt has its own daily limit (12,000 ng by default) and its own food database, and its values are shown in nanograms (ng) to match the published low-cobalt sheets. Switch between the two with the Nickel and Cobalt chips in Settings; whichever you pick becomes the outer ring, and the other keeps running as an inner ring.

2. The home screen

The home screen is your daily dashboard. From top to bottom it shows the date navigator, the daily ring, the meal selector, the Food Management panel, the meal card you're logging into, and the day's mood and notes. Links to this guide, the FAQ, Pro & Tip Jar, the data sources, and Legal & Disclaimer sit in the footer.

• Date navigator — use the < and > buttons to move between days. A cue above the date says Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, or how many days away you are, so you always know which day you're logging.
• Daily ring — your running total for the day against your limit.
• Logging selector — pick which meal you are adding food to; its card opens below the Food Management panel.
• Food Management — an expandable panel for looking up and saving food values, building a prepared dish, scanning a product, and opening the full database and your recipes.
• How did today feel? and Notes — your personal journal for the day.

The icons in the top bar open Trends & History (the bar-chart icon) and Tracking Settings (the gear).

3. Reading the daily ring

The ring fills as you log food and changes color to tell you where you stand against your limit. The thresholds are configurable in Settings.

The ring turns amber at your Caution threshold and red at your Over-limit threshold — 80% and 100% of the limit by default, both adjustable in Settings. Trends and the PDF report classify days by the same two thresholds, so the ring, the calendar, and the report always agree. In the example below the day has reached 181.5 µg against a 150 µg nickel limit, so the ring is red — and the day is tagged Rough with a note about what pushed it over. The green inner ring is the day's cobalt total, shown when Pro is active.

4. Logging a meal

1. Tap Logging: Select a Meal to Log and choose Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or Snacks.
2. In the meal card that appears, type a food name into the Food field. Matching foods drop down as you type — tap one to fill in its reference value automatically. Typing a name that exactly matches a database entry fills the value in too.
3. Enter the Amt you ate and pick a unit from the menu beside it (grams by default; ounces, pounds, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, milliliters, and pieces are also available). Piece sizes are per food, so 2 pieces of egg or banana weigh what they should.
4. Tap the + button to add it. The food appears in the meal and both the meal total and the daily ring update instantly.

Each logged row has a pencil icon to edit the amount or value and a trash icon to remove it. The form also offers Compound dish — build from ingredients (see compound foods), Scan for a product barcode, and Scan menu for a restaurant menu. When you're done with a meal, tap the ✕ in the meal header to close it — your entries are saved automatically.

5. Searching the food database

To look up a food's value without logging it, tap Food Management and use the Food name field. The app searches its built-in database, the built-in compound recipes, and any recipes you've created.

Each food is a single entry with one value, pooled and averaged across every measurement in the source data rather than split into a separate row per country — so the list stays short and readable. Search matches every word you type in any order, so cooked egg and egg, cooked both find the same food; exact and start-of-name matches sort to the top.

To save or correct a value yourself, type the food name, enter a number in the µg / 100g field, and tap Save to DB. Your value is stored for the element you're tracking and used everywhere that food appears.

6. Looking up foods that aren't listed

If you type a food that isn't in the local database — in a meal card or in Food Management — a look-up row appears under the field: "jackfruit" isn't in your food list yet. From there you can:

• Find value online — an in-app lookup that reads a value from a Google AI Overview. After you confirm, it runs the search more than once and only keeps a reading that sits next to both the tracked element and your food's name, so a figure for a different food on the same page is rejected. A reported range is treated as its midpoint, and alternate word orders are tried if the first wording finds nothing. When the readings agree it offers that figure, together with every reading and the exact sentence the value came from; when they disagree it lists them so you pick one (or none). A reading above the AI lookup verify-above value in Settings is set aside rather than counted: it can't confirm a value, the result lists it as ignored, and it is only offered — flagged in red — when nothing else was read at all. Figures that belong to a sentence about daily limits or intake are skipped outright. If nothing is found, a Search deeper button tries longer with more wordings. Use the eye icon to watch the page as it runs, or Stop to cancel.
• Search in browser — opens the same Google search in the in-app browser so you can read the results yourself.
• USDA site — opens the U.S. Department of Agriculture's FoodData Central search, pre-filled with your food. Builds that include a USDA key also show a direct Search USDA button that returns a value in place.

Whatever value you accept can be used for the meal straight away (Use) or written into your local database (Just save to DB), so the next time you type that food it's already there. Nothing is sent until you tap Search in the consent dialog — see privacy.

7. Scanning packaged foods

For store-bought products, skip the typing entirely: scan the package's barcode. In any meal card tap Scan; in Food Management tap Scan a product. A dialog explains what will be looked up; confirm, then point the camera at the code. The app fetches the product's label from Open Food Facts (with a USDA branded-food fallback on builds that include a key) and turns it into a compound food:

• Ingredients arrive pre-portioned. Packaged labels list ingredients by weight but rarely give exact quantities, so portions are estimated from the label's own composition data over one serving (or 100 g) — the first ingredients carry the most weight. Every row is editable before you log.
• Missing values are looked up automatically. Anything your database can't price goes through the in-app online search right after the scan — no extra taps, and only for the ingredients that actually need it. The scan consent covers this follow-up, so it doesn't ask again.
• Scans are remembered. The Save to My Recipes box above the Add button is ticked by default, so the product is saved to My Recipes linked to its barcode. Rescanning the same product later loads your saved copy instantly and offline, with whatever amounts you tuned. Untick it for a one-off.

8. Scanning a restaurant menu (Pro)

Eating out? Tap Scan menu in the meal card. After you confirm the consent dialog, the camera opens: photograph the section of the menu with your dish. The text is read on your phone — the photo is never uploaded, and it's deleted as soon as the text has been recognized. The app then shows a Which dish? list of what it found; pick yours.

The dish is resolved in this order: your own recipes, then an exact match in your food list, then TheMealDB recipe database (only the dish name is sent), then the menu's own description words, then the closest match in your food list. The ingredients land in the compound builder with estimated portions, and any that still lack a value are looked up together automatically, exactly as after a barcode scan. Review and adjust the amounts — menu portions are guesses — then add the dish to the meal.

9. Managing the food database

Open Food Management → View & Manage Food Database to see the full Manage Foods list. Every entry shows its name and value in µg per 100 g.

• Use the search box to filter the list as you type.
• Tap a row's pencil to edit it in place — rename a food or correct its value without deleting and re-adding it.
• Tick one or more checkboxes to select foods, then tap Delete Selected — handy for pruning foods you'll never log. Deletion is immediate, so check the selection first.
• Tap Look up food in the corner to look up and add a food — or a prepared dish — without leaving this screen. It's the same look-up panel described above, so a value you find is saved straight into the database.

10. Compound foods & custom recipes

A compound food is a dish made of several ingredients. The app ships with recipes for many common items — type something like big mac, whopper, or turkey club sandwich and it breaks the dish into its ingredients and sums their values.

For a cooked dish that isn't in any recipe list, tick Compound dish — build from ingredients in the meal card. An ingredients card opens where you can add ingredients by hand, or tap Find ingredients online: after you confirm, the app searches TheMealDB for the dish (reworded names work too — wellington beef finds Beef Wellington), lists its typical ingredients, estimates a per-serving portion for each, and sums their values so you can review the total before adding. Only the dish name leaves your device — see privacy.

Every real ingredient is kept, even if the app can't price it — unpriced ones stay visible at 0.0 µg rather than being silently dropped. Tap Look up all missing (N) online to price the remaining ones from a single online search in one pass, with live progress and a Stop button; or tap an ingredient and fill in a value by hand. The same batch look-up is available in the recipe builder — and after a barcode or menu scan it starts automatically for anything the scan couldn't price.

Tick Also save as a reusable recipe before you add the dish and it becomes a searchable food for next time. The same builder lives in Food Management as Prepared dish — look up ingredients online, where the finishing action is Save as recipe instead of adding to a meal.

Your own recipes

Open Food Management → My Recipes.

1. Tap New Recipe.
2. Give the recipe a name — this becomes a searchable food you can log like any other.
3. Tap Add Ingredient to build it up. Adjust portions, use the substitute arrows to swap an ingredient for a lower one (the list sorts lowest first), or remove ones you skip.
4. Add free-text Notes / instructions if you like, then tap Save.

The dialog shows a running Total so you can see the trade-offs as you tweak the recipe, and a Most of it line names the ingredients contributing the most. Saved recipes appear in autocomplete tagged as compound. Tap a recipe to edit it; the trash icon deletes it immediately. When you change someone else's recipe — an imported or shared one — Save as my version keeps your edit as a separate recipe beside the original, labelled My version of ….

11. Importing recipes

Recipes you already cook from don't have to be typed in. On My Recipes, tap the import icon (the link with a plus) to open Import a recipe, which has three tabs:

• Web — paste a recipe page's address, or share the page to Trace Elements from your browser. Your phone loads the page itself, once, and keeps just the recipe: name, yield, times, ingredients, and steps. Pictures and stories are not kept, and nothing goes through a server of ours. If a page doesn't expose its recipe, the dialog switches to Paste so you can copy the text in instead.
• Paste — paste recipe text from an email, a note, or anywhere else. Sharing plain text to the app opens this tab already filled in.
• Scan (Pro) — photograph a recipe card or cookbook page, up to six pages (front and back count separately), or pick photos you already took. The pages are read on your phone; nothing is uploaded.

For pasted and scanned recipes, choose whether it's your own or a family recipe or from a cookbook, magazine or website. That choice is saved with the recipe and decides what goes out if you share it later.

Review every line

Whatever the source, the recipe opens on Review recipe before anything is saved. Each ingredient shows what the app understood, with the original text underneath as Source. Tap a line to fix it, give it a section (such as For the sauce), or remove it; drag the handle to reorder; and add anything that was missed. Fractions, abbreviations, and old-fashioned wording are read for you: 1 c. oleo becomes 1 cup margarine. Lines the app is unsure about are flagged in red, and a banner counts them, so butter the size of an egg becomes 4 tbsp butter for you to check. The steps are editable too: one step per line, with # starting a section heading.

Tap Look up values and continue and the recipe moves into the recipe builder with each ingredient priced from your food list. Ingredients it can't match show 0, exactly as in the compound builder: tap Look up all missing to price them online, pick a similar food, or enter a value yourself. Then Save. The recipe remembers where it came from (Scanned, Pasted, or the web page's site), and scanned pages stay with it so you can check the recipe against the card. A recipe interrupted halfway is offered back to you the next time you open the app.

12. Sharing recipes

Every recipe on My Recipes has a share icon (the recipe editor has one too). Choose how to send it:

• Recipe file — for someone with Trace Elements. They open the file and the recipe lands in their app, with its values recalculated from the food data on their own phone; your numbers are shown alongside for comparison. A scanned recipe can include its scan if you switch that on, which makes the file much larger.
• As text — plain text anyone can read, in a message or an email.

Add an optional Shared by name if you'd like the recipient to see who sent it. It's whatever you type, never read from your phone or an account. What will be shared lists everything in the file: the recipe, its values, the source, your notes and, only if you chose to include it, the scan. Your logs, journal, and settings are never part of it. For a recipe from a web page, cookbook, or magazine, the steps are left out and the source is credited instead; tap Write your own steps if you'd like to send instructions in your own words.

Sending goes through your phone's normal share sheet, straight to the app or person you pick. There are no accounts, links, or servers involved. Sharing and receiving recipes is free for everyone.

To move all your recipes at once, for example to a second device, use the export icon (arrow up) in the top bar of My Recipes; it saves your current element's recipes to one file. The download icon opens a recipe file from someone else or another device. Imported recipes are added alongside your own without overwriting anything.

13. Grocery lists

Turn the recipes you're cooking this week into one shopping list. Open the cart icon on My Recipes and tap New list, then tick the recipes you want. The box beside each recipe is its servings: change it and the amounts scale with it. Tap Build list.

Matching ingredients are combined, and each line says how much you need and which recipes need it. Tap a line for the exact amounts. Two quick toggles at the top keep the list short: Hide spices and Hide pantry staples. Swipe a line right for Have it (just this time) or left for Always have, which adds it to your pantry staples so it stays off future lists too. Either way the line moves to a collapsed Already have section, one tap away if you change your mind. You can manage pantry staples from the icon at the top of the Grocery lists screen, and add items no recipe calls for at the bottom of any list.

At the store, tap the cart icon for shopping mode: bigger text, big checkboxes, and checked items sink to the bottom of their aisle. The list saves every change as you go, so it survives closing the app and works offline.

The list's ⋮ menu has the rest:

• Add or change recipes reopens the picker with the list's recipes already ticked. Lines you've checked, items you have, and anything you added by hand are kept. You can also add a recipe to an open list from the cart icon on its row in My Recipes, or straight after importing one.
• Share as text sends the list to anyone. Print and Export PDF are part of Pro, and stay free on devices that had PDF reports before Pro launched.
• Flag high-nickel items (or cobalt) marks the items carrying the most of your tracked element in the shared, printed, or PDF list, and Include "already have" in exports adds the items you skipped at the end. Keep screen awake stops the phone dimming while you shop.
• Done shopping archives the list. You can reuse an archived list later, with its checks cleared.

14. Favorites, repeating & moving meals

If you eat the same combination often, you don't have to re-add each food. Every meal card's header carries a strip of reuse controls, left to right:

• The copy icon (Copy this meal from yesterday) pulls the same meal from the previous day into today. It appends to whatever is already there and does nothing if yesterday's meal was empty. Because it works one meal at a time, you can repeat breakfast without dragging in last night's dinner.
• The move icon (Move this meal to another day) is the one-step fix for a meal logged on the wrong date: choose yesterday or today from the list, or Other day… to pick any date in a calendar, and the whole meal — foods, amounts, and ingredient breakdowns — transfers there. Anything already on the target day's same meal is kept, and both days' moods and notes are untouched.
• The ★ star (Recall Favorites) lets you drop a saved template back into any meal in one tap.
• The ♥ heart (Save Favorite) stores the current meal as a reusable template under a name you choose.
• The ✕ closes the card.

15. Mood & notes journal

Below the meal card, How did today feel? lets you tag the day Good, Okay, or Rough (tap the chosen one again to clear it), and the Notes box captures symptoms, energy, or anything else worth remembering. These travel with the day, so when you review your history you can line up how you felt against what you ate.

16. Trends & history

Tap the bar-chart icon in the top bar to open Trends & History. Toggle between a Week bar chart and a Month calendar, each colored by how the day landed against your Caution and Over-limit thresholds — the same rule the daily ring uses.

Use the arrows to move between weeks or months. Tap a day to open it on the home screen and read its journal entry alongside the meals. When you track both elements, a day is colored by whichever element did worse, and the month view adds a Ni↑, Co↑, or Ni+Co↑ badge naming it.

Exporting a report for your clinician

The PDF icon in the top bar builds a report you can save or share — handy to bring to a clinic visit. Tap it and pick a date range (it defaults to the last 30 days), tap Save in the picker, then choose where to store the PDF. PDF reports are part of Pro; devices that had the app before Pro launched keep them free.

17. Settings, limits & backup

The gear icon opens Tracking Settings.

Backup & restore

Under Backup & Restore, Back up to file… saves a single file containing your foods, favorites, recipes, daily logs, and settings. You can store it anywhere your device's file picker reaches — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or local storage. Backup to file is part of Pro; devices that had the app before Pro launched keep it free.

Restore from file… loads a backup back into the app and is never locked. Restoring replaces everything currently in the app — foods, favorites, logs, and settings — so the app asks you to confirm first, and the action can't be undone.

18. Pro & Tip Jar

Open Pro & Tip Jar from the home-screen footer or the Pro & tip jar… button in Settings. Everything you use for day-to-day tracking is free and stays free. Trace Elements Pro ($1.99/month or $12.99/year through Google Play) adds cobalt tracking alongside nickel, menu scanning, recipe-card scanning, PDF reports, grocery list printing, and backup to a file. There's no paywall screen anywhere: a locked control shows a lock, and tapping it explains what Pro adds with a Not now button.

Restore purchases brings Pro back on a new phone signed into the same Google account. The Tip jar offers three one-off thank-yous ($1.99, $4.99, $9.99) that unlock nothing and never recur. See the FAQ for what early users keep for free.

Have a question? Read the FAQ →