Custom nutrients
Track any nutrient, with your own goal
Other trackers give you three macros and a wall.
Limits
Sunday, Sep 13
Caps
The iced latte took you past it.
Custom metrics
Flagged today
Cocoa is a category where consumer testing has repeatedly found cadmium and lead. No amount is measurable from a photo.
You asked to be told about this one.
The nutrient you were told to watch is never a field
A doctor, a dietitian or a lab result names something specific — folate, iron, iodine, potassium — and the app you already use does not have it. You get calories, protein, carbs and fat, and if you are lucky fiber and sodium.
That is a reasonable product decision for an app built around a daily calorie target and three rings. Every nutrient outside that loop is a database column with no screen attached to it. It is also a bad outcome for the person holding a specific number they were asked to hit.
One registry, everything generated from it
AIM is built the other way around. There is a single nutrient registry, and the extraction schema, the meal card, the metric picker, the charts and the goals are all generated from it. A nutrient is not a special case — it is a row.
Fourteen ship as standard. Beyond those, a custom metric takes three things: a name, a unit (µg, mg, g, ml), and a goal or a cap with a daily or weekly period. From then on it is estimated on every meal, gets its own color, and appears in the week chart.
Pin five, record all of them
Tracking a nutrient and seeing a nutrient are separate decisions, which is what makes this survivable.
Every metric you have added is recorded on every meal. Your meal card shows only the handful you pinned — five or so, whatever you are watching this month. The rest sit behind “more”: still recorded, still chartable, still there when you want to look. Adding folate does not turn your lunch into a spreadsheet.
Where the error bars are
A photograph plus a description estimates portion and composition well. It estimates calories and protein better than it estimates micronutrients, because vitamin and mineral content varies with soil, cultivar, storage time and cooking method in ways an image does not contain.
Fortified foods carry a label number that is reliable, and AIM will use it if you say the food was fortified. Leafy greens vary by a factor of two depending on freshness. Treat the trend across a week as meaningful and any single day as approximate — a caveat that applies to every food database ever built, including the ones that print three decimal places without mentioning it.
Questions
- Can I track folic acid in a macro tracker?
- In most macro trackers, no — they expose calories and the three macros and little else. AIM lets you add any nutrient as a custom metric with its own unit and daily or weekly goal, folate included.
- How many nutrients can I add?
- There is no fixed limit. What keeps it manageable is that only the metrics you pin appear on your meal cards; everything else is recorded and charted without cluttering the day.
- What units are supported?
- Micrograms, milligrams, grams and milliliters, plus a plain count for things that are not nutrients at all — sweetened drinks a week, alcohol units, takeaway meals.
Related features
Read more
A food diary you might actually keep
AIM is free on iPhone. Fourteen nutrients per meal, water counted from food, caps on anything you want to stay under.