There’s a ton of diet and nutrition apps on the market, but for the most part they focus on things like weight loss or counting calories and stuff like that. Which is why it’s nice to find a new app which takes a new and different approach to keeping us healthy (wealthy and wise?).

NutriHawk is designed specifically to monitor our intake of essential vitamins and minerals. Of course tracking the intake of this kind of stuff is more like a guessing game than anything else, but we like the way the developer is up front with this, and lets you use the app as an indicator of your intake rather than something to be obsessed about.

It’s a fact that the standard western diet can be sadly lacking in some of the things we need, so it’s always going to be valuable to have a reference point which can highlight potential problems before they become acute. To use the app, you simply enter in the food you’ve eaten that day, and the app will return its estimate of how you’re doing regarding vitamins and minerals. As we said, it’s very broad brush, but at least it offers something.

The app, which is Android only at the moment, is very new, which inevitably means the food database is going to be small, and so we couldn’t locate things like lettuce and other varied vegetables to add to our diet. We’d like to see the ability to add your own foods to the database, and even create your own menus, so you could tick a box for the kind of meals which are fairly repetitive, like breakfast.

But overall we love the idea of this app, and really hope it takes off. Any information we can get about the effects of our eating habits on our health gets a big plus from us. Nice work!