[NUTRITION]
Micronutrients: Eighteen Nutrients, and Your Coverage
[THE SHORT ANSWER]
Base tracks eighteen micronutrients and reports explicitly what share of your day's food it actually has data for. That second part is the unusual one: if the app knows the micronutrients for 62% of today's calories, it says 62% rather than presenting the totals as if they were complete. A micronutrient figure computed over part of your intake is not a micronutrient figure, and showing it without the denominator would be a lie by omission.
The selection rule
A nutrient earns a row only if it clears one of two bars.
Build — shortfall demonstrably costs training adaptation:
vitamin D · magnesium · zinc · iron · calcium · potassium · omega-3 (EPA+DHA)
Baseline — shortfall costs health, and a real share of adults are short:
fibre · sodium · B12 · folate · vitamin A · vitamin C · vitamin E · vitamin K · selenium · iodine · choline
Everything else is deliberately excluded: thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, B6, biotin, pantothenic acid, phosphorus, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, chloride.
Not because they do not matter physiologically — they do. Because population inadequacy is near nil in anyone eating enough calories with any protein at all, so the row would be green every single day. An always-green row costs attention while teaching nothing, and attention is the scarcest resource on any screen an athlete looks at at 6am.
Why coverage is the headline number
Most tracking apps present a micronutrient panel as though the totals were complete. They are not, and the gap is often large: food databases carry macros for nearly everything and micronutrients for a fraction of it, and a homemade meal entered as calories and macros carries no micronutrient data at all.
So the panel shows totals for the food it knows and a coverage figure for how much of the day that was. At 45% coverage, a "low magnesium" reading is not information — it is a reading over less than half your food.
This is the same rule that governs every other missing input in the app. A number that says "I am incomplete" is more useful than one that hides it.
The two that matter most for hybrid athletes
Iron
Endurance training depresses iron status, and running does so through a mechanism cycling does not have: foot-strike haemolysis, the mechanical destruction of red blood cells in the feet with every stride. Add sweat losses and gastrointestinal losses and a runner's iron requirement is meaningfully higher than a sedentary person's.
Low iron is one of the most common correctable causes of unexplained fatigue, declining performance and poor recovery in runners. It is also invisible without a blood test — the symptoms are indistinguishable from overtraining, under-eating and poor sleep, which is exactly the differential a hybrid athlete is already trying to sort out.
The screen flags likely low intake. It does not diagnose deficiency, and it should not: that requires ferritin, and ferritin requires a blood draw. What tracking gives you is the ability to rule intake in or out before you go looking for a training explanation.
Sodium
Higher sweat volume means higher losses, and the standard advice to limit sodium was written for a sedentary population with hypertension risk. An athlete doing two-a-days in summer is not that population.
Under-replacing costs performance, and at the extreme — high fluid intake with low sodium replacement over a long session — it is genuinely dangerous.
The others worth watching
| Nutrient | Why it earns a row for this population |
|---|---|
| Vitamin D | Widespread inadequacy, particularly at latitude and in winter. Affects bone, immune function and possibly muscle function |
| Magnesium | Genuinely common shortfall; involved in energy metabolism and muscle function. Losses rise with sweat |
| Calcium | Bone. Non-negotiable for a runner, and often short in anyone avoiding dairy |
| Potassium | Almost universally short in Western diets, because the recommendation assumes far more fruit and vegetables than people eat |
| Omega-3 | Short in most diets that are not fish-heavy. Relevant to inflammation and recovery |
| Fibre | Short in most high-protein diets, and the first casualty of eating for macros rather than for food |
| Zinc | Losses rise with sweat; involved in immune function and hormonal status |
What the screen will not do
No supplement recommendations. The honest supplement list is short — creatine monohydrate at 5 g/day is the only one with unambiguous hypertrophy evidence, protein powder is a food, caffeine is performance, and vitamin D fixes a deficiency rather than being ergogenic. Everything else is not worth the money or the tracking overhead. An app that recommends supplements for every yellow row is an app with a different business model.
No deficiency diagnosis. Intake is not status. Low intake makes low status more likely; it does not establish it, and only a blood test does.
No traffic-light judgement on individual foods. A colour-coded moral judgement on a meal is a different product.
What to do next
Check coverage before reading any total on this screen. If it is below about 70%, the useful action is to add micronutrient data to your most-eaten foods rather than to change your diet based on a reading over two-thirds of it.
How to eat for hybrid training covers the macro side, where the numbers are much more complete.
Questions
Which micronutrients should athletes track?
Base tracks eighteen on two bars: those where shortfall demonstrably costs training adaptation — vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, iron, calcium, potassium and omega-3 — and those where shortfall costs health and a real share of adults are short, which covers fibre, sodium, B12, folate, vitamins A, C, E and K, selenium, iodine and choline.
Why does Base not track all vitamins?
Because population inadequacy is near nil for the rest in anyone eating enough calories with any protein. Thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, B6, biotin, pantothenic acid, phosphorus, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum and chloride are deliberately excluded — an always-green row costs attention while teaching nothing.
What is micronutrient coverage?
The share of the day's logged calories that Base actually has micronutrient data for. If it has data for 62 percent of what you ate, it says 62 percent rather than presenting the totals as complete. A total computed over part of your intake is not a total, and showing it without the denominator is a lie by omission.
Do runners need more iron?
Endurance training depresses iron status, and running in particular does so through foot-strike haemolysis. It is one of the most common correctable causes of unexplained fatigue and declining performance in runners, and it is invisible without a blood test — the tracking here flags likely low intake, it does not diagnose deficiency.
Should I take a multivitamin instead of tracking?
A multivitamin covers the small gaps and does nothing about the large ones, because the nutrients most often short in athletic diets — magnesium, potassium, calcium, omega-3, fibre — are needed in quantities a single tablet cannot carry. Tracking tells you which of those is actually short for you.
[KEEP READING]
[GUIDES]
How to Eat for Hybrid Training
Three macros, set in a specific order, so that the one that should move with training is the one that does.
[SCREENS]
The Food Log: Template Replay Instead of Database Search
Most food trackers are built for discovery. A serious athlete eats the same thing most days, so this one is built for repetition.
[GUIDES]
Supplements for Hybrid Athletes: The Honest Short List
Four things with real evidence, one of which will make your scale lie to you for three weeks if you start it at the wrong time.