Most calorie apps want a login, a subscription, and a database that quietly tracks what you eat. This shortcut skips all of that. You scan a barcode, confirm the serving, and the numbers land straight in Apple Health, no account attached.
What this shortcut does
Point your camera at a food’s barcode and it pulls the nutrition facts for that product, then writes them to Apple Health scaled to whatever serving you actually ate. When a product isn’t in the database, you have two fallbacks: ask an AI to estimate the profile, or type the values in by hand. Either way the result can be saved to a file on your device.
It covers far more than calories. The data model includes fat, saturated and unsaturated fat, carbohydrates, sugars, fiber, protein, salt, and a long list of vitamins and minerals from vitamin C and D down to iron, zinc, magnesium, and potassium.
What you need
- Files — stores the offline food entries the shortcut creates, so you can re-log a saved item later without any connection.
- Apple Health — the destination. Every logged item is written here under your nutrition data, where the Health app charts it over time.
- A camera, for the barcode step. AI and manual entry work without one.
Adding it to your iPhone
- Tap Add Shortcut on this page, using the iPhone you’ll log food from.
- When the Shortcuts app opens, scroll the preview down and tap Add Shortcut to confirm.
- Run it once and approve the prompts when iOS asks for Camera, Files, and Health access.
First-run setup
The first run is where you tell the shortcut how you eat. It asks you to set a default serving size and pick the file it will read from and write to. That serving size matters: nutrition labels list values per 100g, so if you log a 50g portion the shortcut halves the numbers before they reach Health. Set it once and every later scan is adjusted for you.
Using it day-to-day
Run the shortcut, then choose how to log. Scanning a barcode is the fast path for packaged food and takes only a few seconds. For a homemade meal or something with no label, the AI route lets you describe the dish and get an estimate back, while manual entry is there when you already know the exact numbers. Confirm the portion and the entry is written to Health.
Because saved items live in your Files document, anything you’ve logged before can be re-added offline. Handy for a packed lunch you eat every day, or for logging on a flight.
Customizing it
The single biggest setting is the serving size you established at setup, and you can change it any time your usual portion does. Your food file is the other lever. Keeping the products you eat often in that document turns repeat logging into a couple of taps and removes the network round-trip entirely.
Where your data lives
Two places, both yours. Logged nutrients go into Apple Health on the device, governed by the Health permissions you granted. Saved food entries sit in a file in your Files app. There’s no separate account and nothing syncs to a third-party server, which is the trade-off you make for doing the bookkeeping yourself.
FAQ
What happens when a barcode isn’t recognized?
You’re not stuck. Switch to the AI option and describe the food, or punch the values in manually from the label. Both still write to Health the same way a scan would.
Does the AI estimate count against anything?
It’s an estimate, not a measurement, so treat AI-generated numbers as a rough guide rather than a lab readout. For anything you track closely, a scanned barcode or the printed label will be more accurate.
Some nutrients I see listed aren’t actually logging. Is it broken?
No. The author included extra fields like biotin, selenium, and a few amino acids ahead of time so older saved files stay compatible if Health starts accepting them later. For now, the everyday macros and common vitamins are the ones that actually write.
