Health eTool · Free

What Nutrients Am I Missing?

Enter everything you ate across one day. You’ll see which nutrients that day supplied well, which look like gaps, and the specific foods that would close the biggest ones. One day, once — tracking day after day is what the VitalFill app is for.

Step 1 About you

Your reference intakes

These change your nutrient targets — a breastfeeding woman needs roughly twice the iodine of a non-pregnant adult, protein is set per kilogram of body weight, and height changes the calorie figure by several hundred a day.

Questions people actually ask about this

How do I know which nutrients I am missing?

Enter a full day of food and compare the totals against reference intakes set for your age, sex, weight and life stage. This tool does that using USDA FoodData Central values and the NIH Dietary Reference Intakes. It shows what your food supplied — it cannot tell you whether you have a deficiency, which depends on blood levels, absorption, medication and supplements.

Can one day of food tell me if I am deficient?

No. One day is a snapshot, and intake varies a great deal day to day. A single low day is normal and means little on its own; a pattern across weeks is what matters. Blood levels are the only way to establish actual nutritional status.

Why does the tool say there is not enough data for some nutrients?

Because USDA generic food data does not carry values for every nutrient. Iodine, biotin, molybdenum and chromium have no values at all in the datasets this tool uses, and manganese and pantothenic acid are missing from the survey foods. Summing a missing value as zero would make everyone look deficient, so those nutrients are shown separately rather than counted as gaps.

Why is vitamin D handled separately?

Because almost no food contains meaningful vitamin D, so a food-based check flags it for nearly everyone, which makes the flag useless. Vitamin D is mainly a question of sun exposure and supplementation rather than diet, so it is reported on its own rather than ranked among dietary gaps.

Which reference intakes does this use?

The NIH Dietary Reference Intakes — RDA where one exists, Adequate Intake otherwise — selected by age band, sex and pregnancy or lactation status. Protein is scaled to body weight, and energy uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation with an activity factor.