What Minthe actually does
Logging is free forever. The analysis is the paid part. Everything below is marked.
Getting it logged, fast enough that you keep doing it
The best tracking method is the one you are still using in three weeks, so there are four ways in and you pick per meal rather than committing to one.
Type it Free
Most meals are things you eat often.
Search the food database, or save a meal once and re-log it in a tap. The trigger-food catalogue ships with the app. A 349-food edition of it is published free as the FODMAP food list.
Barcode lookup Free
A packaged product you buy every week should not need typing out.
Scan the barcode and the product is looked up on Open Food Facts, a free public food database. Its recorded ingredients and nutrition win over a model estimate, because a real ingredient list beats a guess. It never uses one of your AI scans.
AI meal photo Premium
Typing out a restaurant plate is exactly the friction that ends most food diaries.
Photograph the meal and it is broken into components. The extraction is deliberately biased toward the things that matter for triggers and demotes incidental oils and condiments, so you get "onion, cream, wheat" rather than a garnish inventory. Free includes 7 scans to start, then 3 a week. Premium is 50 a week and Elite 150.
Hidden-trigger label scan Premium
"Natural flavors" can hide the thing that sets you off, and inulin is in half the protein bars on the shelf.
Point it at an ingredients list and the E-number and alias dictionary flags dairy, FODMAP sources, fermented and histamine-liberating ingredients, gums and sweeteners. It carries a plant-milk false-positive guard, because naive matching flags oat milk for things that are not in it. It also reads the printed nutrition panel, so a packaged food logs with its real macros.
Composite foods Free
A flat white is coffee and milk, and counting it as one thing loses half the information.
A drink or bowl logs as one item with its real macros, plus attribution-only parts beneath it. So a flat white counts as a caffeine exposure and a lactose exposure without double-counting the milk. Swappable parts are slots: set your usual milk once, override it on any single meal.
Your own foods and mixes Free
Your granola is not the catalogue entry for granola.
Add a food the catalogue does not have. Build a homemade mix by weight so each ingredient counts toward what you actually ate. Add your own tags too. The symptom list itself is fixed, so every entry means the same thing next month.
Alcohol, counted Free
Two glasses of wine is not a detail to leave out of a gut diary.
Drinks you log, scan or look up by barcode count toward the day in units. Alcohol is tracked as its own macro. The analysis treats it as a confounder alongside sleep and stress.
What each meal just did Free
Logging only pays off weeks later, which is when most people stop.
Save a meal and Minthe says what it added, as a fact rather than a prize: "2nd meal with garlic. Minthe starts testing at 3." No points, no badges, no streak. A coverage calendar shows which days are logged.
Recording how you actually feel
Bloating, in detail Free
"Bloated" covers a lot of different experiences.
Severity, timing and location. Severity reads as more or less, never as good or bad, and nothing here scores you.
Stool tracking Free
It is the most useful thing you can bring to a gastroenterologist and the easiest to forget by evening.
Bristol type 1 to 7, frequency, urgency, evacuation quality and color flags. The scale itself is explained on our free Bristol chart.
The rest of the symptom set Free
Gut symptoms rarely arrive alone.
Gas, pain, burping, nausea, reflux, fatigue and brain fog, each logged in a few taps.
IBS-SSS severity scoring Free
You need a way to tell whether things are actually improving over months, not just today.
The IBS Severity Scoring System (Francis et al., 1997): a five-question check-in covering the last 10 days. The card shows how your score changed since your last check-in against the 50-point line the instrument treats as a meaningful change, rather than labeling you with a band. The full score goes into your clinician report. It is a published instrument your clinician may already recognize, which is the reason we use it rather than a score of our own.
Red-flag triage Free
Some symptoms mean stop tracking and get assessed.
A one-time check for the symptoms that need a clinician rather than a diary. A positive answer pauses insights, shows a clinician banner and blocks intensive protocols, because continuing to hunt for trigger foods on top of those is the wrong thing to be doing. Only the resulting flag is stored, never which symptoms you ticked. See the red flag list.
End-of-day review Free
A day with no symptoms logged could be a quiet day or a forgotten one. The difference matters.
A short review reads the day back and lets you confirm it. A quiet day you confirm counts as a real zero. One you leave alone stays unknown, which is exactly as informative as before. Anything forgotten is one tap away. The review asks about alcohol too.
The drivers that are not food
This is where most food diaries fall down. Stress, sleep and your cycle are treated as drivers in their own right rather than as noise to filter out, because for a lot of people they explain more than the food does.
Apple Health overlays Free
You already have this data and re-typing it is how tracking dies.
Sleep including deep-sleep stages, resting heart rate, steps, active energy, weight and menstrual cycle, pulled in automatically. Sleep recorded by a Watch and a sleep app is counted once, not added together. Optionally, the nutrition you log is written back to Health. Why the cycle matters so much is covered in bloating and your menstrual cycle.
Stress and daily context Free
A food eaten in a terrible week is not the same exposure as the same food in a calm one.
A quick daily rating, alongside water intake. This is what lets the analysis tell a trigger apart from a marker for bad weeks, which is a distinction a food-only diary cannot make. See stress and gut symptoms.
Meal timing and gut rest Free
When you eat is a variable under test, not just what.
Inter-meal gaps, eating window, overnight rest and grazing frequency, with the familiar 12:12, 14:10 and 16:8 presets and an optional usual start time. You set which days the schedule applies, and off-schedule days are skipped in trends rather than counted against you. A 30-day card shows nightly rest against your goal.
Working out what is actually going on
This is the part that separates a diary from an answer, and it is the paid half of the product. Here is how it works, in plain English.
The correlation engine Premium
A diary tells you what happened. It does not tell you what is causing it.
Each food is compared against how you usually feel, not against a population average. Cards state both rates, never only the alarming one. A suspect only surfaces once it has turned up often enough and stands clearly apart from your usual. Until then you see "not enough data yet".
Bloating judged against your own usual Premium
If you bloat most days, a fixed "bad day" line makes every day look the same.
A bloating log counts as a bad one when it sits clearly above your own recent usual, not above one line set for everyone. For someone who rarely bloats, nothing changes.
Correction for testing many foods at once Premium
Examine fifty foods and two will look significant by pure chance. That is arithmetic, not bad luck.
Every result is checked against the chance of a false alarm, allowing for the foods you tend to eat together. Without that, any app examining a long food list will hand you confident false positives, and you will remove foods you did not need to remove.
Delayed reactions Premium
A reaction four hours after lunch gets blamed on dinner.
Minthe looks for reactions from within the hour to the next day. GOS and fructans in particular are commonly delayed, which is why looking only at the meal before misattributes a large share of reactions.
FODMAP exposure counted by dose Premium
A slice of apple and a bowl of cauliflower are not the same exposure.
How much of a FODMAP group a meal carries is taken into account, not just whether a tag was applied.
Unlogged days treated as unknown Free
Scoring a missed day as symptom-free quietly biases every result you will ever get.
A day you did not log is excluded, never counted as a good day. This matters more than it sounds: gaps slow down how fast patterns emerge, but they do not corrupt them.
Before you eat
Food lookup Free
The question in a supermarket or reading a menu is "should I eat this". A diary only answers it afterwards.
Look up any food before you eat it: the FODMAP groups it carries, how much it takes to count as an exposure, and, once your log has enough, how often you reacted after it, as "X of Y times". Where your own log has something to say, it leads and the catalogue steps back. Nothing is labeled good or bad.
What to eat instead Free
Being told what to cut is easy. Being told what to have instead is the useful part.
Where a food looks like trouble, Minthe suggests swaps, never one that is itself an exposure. Suggestions defer to your trigger profile, so a swap cannot contradict what your own tests found.
Plants this week Free
Almost everything in a gut app pulls toward a shorter food list.
A count of the different plants you ate this week. In the American Gut study (McDonald et al., 2018), people eating around 30 a week had more varied gut bacteria than people eating 10 or fewer. That is an observed link in a self-reported survey, not a target. The card says so. Under 30 is not a failure.
Proving it, instead of guessing
Guided with-and-without trials Premium
A correlation is a hypothesis. Cutting a food because of one bad week is not a test.
Minthe schedules repeated exposures with washout periods between them, then reports whether the effect held up. The challenge days are picked at random intervals in advance and shown to you, so you cannot save the food for a day you already feel good. You record your prediction before the data exists. A food test reports an interval on the difference between test days and your other days. A gluten test cannot start until you have read why celiac testing should come first.
FODMAP reintroduction, group by group Premium
The elimination phase is meant to end. It is easy to stay in it far longer than planned.
Six steps, one FODMAP group at a time, each with a challenge food from the catalogue and the dose it carries. The app tracks which groups you have challenged and what each result was. See how reintroduction works.
Your trigger profile Premium
Findings scattered across cards and tests are hard to act on.
One roster of everything Minthe has concluded about your foods: confirmed, seems to help, testing now, watching, no clear answer and cleared. A correlation on its own never reaches "Confirmed". That takes a test you ran or a lab result.
Timing tests Premium
Sometimes the problem is not the food.
The same controlled structure applied to meal timing and overnight rest, so you can find out whether spacing actually changes anything for you rather than assuming it does.
Structured programs Premium
Knowing you should do a reintroduction is not the same as doing one.
Guided multi-week protocols for the situations where food is not the whole story. Our free reintroduction planner covers the same structure on paper.
Test results, in context
Most people arrive with results already in hand, and a number on a PDF with no reference range is not much use.
Import your existing results One-off
A calprotectin result changes what you should be doing, and it should change what the app tells you.
Enter results from SIBO and IMO breath testing, fecal calprotectin, celiac serology and microbiome panels, with reference ranges applied. Typing results in is free. Importing a report costs $1.99 on any plan. What you import is yours to read with or without a subscription: the report, the markers, the flags and the timeline. A GI-MAP import handles the panels people most often turn up with.
Tests rated by evidence, not by popularity Premium
The tests that market hardest are frequently the ones with the least behind them.
Results are tiered by how much the evidence actually supports them, so a validated marker carries more weight than one that does not. The same reasoning is published free at which gut tests are worth it and on IgG panels.
Results feed the analysis Premium
A positive result should re-order what gets investigated first.
Where a test result is relevant, it re-weights which suspects the engine prioritizes rather than sitting in a separate tab you never open.
Seeing it, and sharing it
Weekly digest and trends Free
You need to know whether this month is better than last, calmly.
A "this week" summary with week-over-week deltas and pattern summaries. Deltas read as more or less. There are no streaks, and a worse week is a datapoint rather than a failure.
CSV and clinician PDF export Free
A gastroenterologist has minutes, and screenshots of a dashboard are close to useless in an appointment.
A CSV of your raw logs and a PDF summary structured for a short consultation, including the IBS-SSS section. Both free, deliberately. See what your doctor actually needs.
Progress photos Free
Distension is visible, and memory of it is unreliable.
A grid and timeline with nearby trials and tests shown as context, side-by-side comparison, and optional face-blur before you share anything.
Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets Free
Opening an app to check one number is how the habit slips.
Two widgets. One shows the calories and macros left today. The other shows which day of a running test it is and what today asks for.
If you also want the numbers
Nutrition and macro mode Free
Some people came here to track intake deliberately, and hiding it helps nobody.
Calculated daily calorie and macro targets from your body metrics, with per-macro overrides, plus macro charts. It is a mode you choose at setup, not the default, and calorie estimates are a single dismissible secondary preference on the gut-focused setting. Nothing here scolds: over target is not a failure state.
Weight, maintenance and fasting days Free
A calculator estimate of what you burn can be off by hundreds of calories.
Weight history with a trend line. Maintenance calories are measured from what you actually logged against how your weight moved, rather than from a formula alone. Fasting days, past ones included, can be marked so the averages read them correctly. Sugars, saturated fat and sodium are tracked per food. Macros on any item can be corrected by hand.
Water and recipes Free
Small things that keep the picture complete.
Water as a first-class card with an optional target rendered as a gentle progress bar and never a streak, plus a recipe bank filterable by meal slot and protein with a seasoning guide derived per protein.
What Minthe deliberately does not do
Worth being explicit, because several of these are things you might expect.
- No gut health score. A single daily number has to produce a value even when there is not enough data, cannot be checked by you, and hides which food and at what dose. We use IBS-SSS instead, which is published and externally recognized. The longer argument.
- No diagnosis. Minthe surfaces hypotheses to discuss with a clinician. It is a wellness and self-tracking tool, not a medical device, and it will not tell you that you have IBS, SIBO or an intolerance.
- No streaks, no guilt states. Missing a day is a gap in the data, which the analysis handles, not a failure you get told about.
- No Android, no web app. iPhone only. If you are on Android, several of the alternatives we review will serve you better.
- No ads, and your data is not sold. Your diary lives on your device and syncs only to your own private iCloud. AI scans you tap go to our proxy. We keep the foods they identified rather than the photo. Barcode lookups go to Open Food Facts. Anonymous usage events never carry what you logged. How that works.
What it costs
Manual logging, the gut-rest timer, trends, reminders, export and red-flag triage are free and unlimited, permanently. Premium is $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year and unlocks the AI scans at 50 a week, the correlation engine, guided trials and reintroduction, the trigger profile, timing tests, the structured programs and lab results feeding your patterns. A lab report import is $1.99 on any plan, Free included. Elite is $59.99 a year and raises the scan ceiling to 150 a week; every other feature is identical. Full pricing.
Minthe is a wellness and self-tracking tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose or treat any condition and isn't a substitute for professional medical advice. If you have red-flag symptoms such as blood in your stool, unintentional weight loss, difficulty swallowing, persistent vomiting or a fever alongside gut symptoms, see a clinician rather than tracking them.
Frequently asked
What can I do without paying?
Unlimited manual meal and symptom logging, barcode lookup, the food lookup before you eat, the end-of-day review, the gut-rest timer, basic trends, widgets, reminders, CSV and clinician-PDF export and the red-flag triage check. None of it is time-limited. Putting a paywall on basic logging would starve the data the analysis depends on, which would make the paid product worse, so the free tier exists for a practical reason rather than as a trial.
What does the AI scan actually do?
Two different things. A meal photo is broken into likely components, biased toward the ones that matter for triggers and away from incidental oils and condiments. A packaged label is read for hidden triggers: the ingredient and E-number dictionary flags dairy, FODMAP sources, fermented and histamine-liberating ingredients, gums and sweeteners, including the aliases manufacturers use. It also reads the printed nutrition panel. Scans are metered: 7 to start and then 3 a week on Free, 50 a week on Premium and 150 on Elite.
Does it do barcodes?
Yes, on every plan including Free. A barcode lookup never uses one of your AI scans. The product is looked up on Open Food Facts, a free public food database. Its recorded ingredients and nutrition are used rather than a model reading the packet. It is the fastest route for a packaged product you buy regularly.
Can I get my data out?
Yes, and it is free. CSV of your raw logs, and a clinician-oriented PDF summary designed to be readable in a short appointment rather than a screenshot dump. Your history is the asset you are building and an app you cannot export from is one you cannot leave, so this is deliberately not a paid feature.
Is there a gut health score?
No, deliberately, and we do not intend to add one. A daily score has to produce a number even on the days when there is not enough data to justify one, it cannot be checked by you, and it compresses away the part you need, which is which food and at what dose. For symptom severity Minthe uses IBS-SSS, a published questionnaire your clinician may already recognize, rather than a scale we invented.