Garmin has dropped one of its biggest health updates to its Connect app in years.
The company is rolling out built-in nutrition tracking, letting you log what you eat and see exactly how it affects training, sleep and recovery.
The feature, simply called Nutrition, sits behind the Garmin Connect+ subscription and effectively turns Garmin Connect into something closer to a full health platform than a companion app.
Think MyFitnessPal, but woven into your workouts, body metrics and AI insights.
According to Garmin, Nutrition is designed for anyone from beginners trying to build healthier habits to performance-focused athletes who want tighter control over fuelling and recovery.
Fuel meets function
Once enabled, Nutrition lets you track calories and macronutrients directly inside the Garmin Connect app.
You can search a large global food database, log packaged and restaurant foods, create custom recipes, or simply scan barcodes.
There’s also AI-powered image recognition, so in some cases, pointing your camera at a meal is enough to start logging (see also: Oura Ring 4).
Everything then appears alongside your existing Garmin data: daily energy burn, workouts, steps, sleep, stress and more. Instead of juggling multiple apps, Garmin is betting that athletes will prefer one central hub showing what they ate and how they performed afterwards.
The app displays daily, weekly, monthly and annual trends for both consumed and targeted calories, plus macros like protein, carbs and fats, helping users get a clearer view of long-term patterns rather than obsessing over single days.
A nudge, not a lecture
Where Nutrition starts to feel different from traditional calorie trackers is Garmin’s integration of Active Intelligence insights.
Here, Garmin uses AI to highlight relationships between behaviour and outcomes. Eat late and sleep badly? The app might point that out and suggest adjustments. Struggling through sessions because you’re under-fuelling? Expect nudges encouraging smarter intake.
Targets can also be personalised. Garmin uses information such as height, weight, gender, activity level and average active calories to recommend calorie and macro goals, though users can tweak everything manually if they prefer.
From the phone to the wrist
Nutrition doesn’t just live on your phone. Compatible Garmin smartwatches can show nutrition summaries and provide quick access to recently logged foods.
Some voice-enabled watches even let you launch the Nutrition app using voice commands, which could be handy mid-commute, mid-ride or mid-snack.
It also plugs into Garmin’s performance dashboard, so athletes can see correlations between fuelling and metrics like training readiness or performance trends, something that would previously require multiple third-party services stitched together.
The move makes sense. Food affects training. Training affects sleep. Sleep affects recovery. Putting all three in one place could help Garmin owners build better routines without needing half a dozen apps to make sense of it all.
The subscription question
Nutrition isn’t free. It sits inside Garmin Connect+, which bundles premium features behind a paywall. Garmin is offering a 30-day free trial to new customers and an additional short-term trial for users who have tested Connect+ before.
If the logging is accurate, the insights are genuinely useful, and the friction is low, Nutrition could become one of the app’s most important features.
If it feels like another paid bolt-on, though, Garmin fans may be less forgiving (as they often are).
I’ll be keeping an eye on how it rolls out, especially how it works in real-world training plans and marathon cycles.
