Macros by Food: Protein, Carbs, and Fat in 41 Common Foods

Every figure below is per 100 g of edible portion, transcribed from the USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy release. Fibre is shown as a subset of carbohydrate, because USDA reports carbohydrate by difference — the fibre grams are already inside the carbohydrate grams, not additional to them.

The state in brackets is part of the data, not decoration. Water content dominates a per-100 g figure, so 100 g of dry rice and 100 g of boiled rice are different foods as far as this chart is concerned. Meat, fish, and produce are listed raw, as you buy them; grains and pulses are listed dry, as you measure them. The raw-versus-cooked section puts numbers on the difference.

Grams of protein per 100 g is the figure every label shows, and it is the wrong one for most planning. If your calories are capped — which is the situation anyone in a deficit is in — what you want to know is how much protein a food buys for a given slice of the energy budget. That is protein per 100 calories, and it reorders the chart completely.

Two things fall out of this list. The first is that the top is not held by the foods with the most protein per 100 g, but by the leanest ones: prawns lead at 23.6 g per 100 calories despite carrying less protein per 100 g than cheddar. Fat is what separates them. Anything that pairs protein with a lot of fat — hard cheese, fatty mince, whole eggs, nuts — drops down the table even when its protein content looks impressive.

The second is a trap. Spinach ranks 11th on this list, ahead of tofu, which is arithmetically true and practically useless: it has almost no calories, so almost anything it contains looks dense per calorie. Protein density tells you what a food costs you in calories. It says nothing about whether you can eat enough of it, which is what the next section is for.

Around 30 g of protein per meal is the figure most recommendations converge on for an average adult. This table takes that fixed amount of protein and asks two questions of each food: how much of it you have to eat, and how many calories that spends.

This is where protein density and practicality separate. 133 g of raw chicken breast is an ordinary portion. Getting the same 30 g from broccoli takes 1,064 g — over a kilogram, which nobody eats at a sitting even though broccoli looks respectable on the density ranking. At the other end, white rice spends 1,536 calories to deliver 30g of protein, which is most of a day's budget for one meal's worth of protein.

The practical reading: build meals around the foods in the top third of the density ranking, and treat the protein in grains, nuts, and vegetables as a bonus that accumulates across the day rather than something you can hit a target with. To find the target itself, the protein calculator scales it to your body weight and training, and the protein intake chart lists every recommended intake across the adult weight range.

Cooking does not change how much protein or fat is in your food. It changes how much water is, and every per-100 g figure is quoted against a weight that includes that water. Meat loses water and concentrates; grains and pulses absorb it and dilute. Weigh in one state and log in the other, and the error is large.

Chicken breast gains 38% in calories per 100 g when roasted, so logging a cooked portion against the raw figure undercounts it by about a fifth. Rice runs the other way and much harder: boiled rice is 64% lower per 100 g than dry, so logging a cooked bowl against the dry figure roughly triples it. That single mistake is enough to turn a deficit into a surplus.

The fix is not precision, it is consistency. Pick one state per food — raw for meat, dry for grains, is the easiest to keep straight because it is the weight on the packet — and always use the matching database entry. If you cook in batches, weigh the whole batch raw, weigh it again cooked, and divide.

The familiar rule is 4 calories per gram of protein and carbohydrate, 9 per gram of fat. Apply it to the rows above and it will not match the calorie column — and the gaps are not rounding. USDA does not use those numbers for most foods. It uses factors specific to each food group, published by Merrill and Watt in Agriculture Handbook 74, which account for how completely the protein, fat, and carbohydrate in that particular food are digested and absorbed. Vegetable protein is credited at 2.44 calories per gram, not 4.

The errors run in both directions and they are systematic. On low-calorie, high-fibre plant foods, 4/4/9 reads high — by 28% on spinach — because a meaningful share of the carbohydrate is fibre that is not fully available, and because vegetable protein carries the 2.44 factor. On animal foods it reads low, since egg and dairy protein are credited above 4 calories per gram. Apply the specific factors instead and every published figure on this chart comes back to within 0.4 calories, which is how those figures were derived in the first place.

None of this should change how you plan. The differences are a few percent on the foods that make up most of a day's calories, and they cancel in both directions across a mixed diet. It matters for one thing only: if you are adding up macros by hand and the total does not match the calorie figure, the database is not wrong and neither are you.

A chart of food composition is only half the job — you still need the totals to aim at. The order that works is targets first, foods second:

1. Get your maintenance calories from the TDEE calculator, then set a deficit or surplus with the calorie deficit calculator.
2. Split that total into grams of protein, carbohydrate, and fat with the macro calculator.
3. Fill the protein number first, from the top of the density ranking. It is the hardest of the three to hit and the one worth protecting in a deficit.
4. Spend what is left on carbohydrate and fat according to what you enjoy and what fuels your training. Both are far more interchangeable than protein is.

• These are averages of sampled foods. USDA figures come from analysed composites, so an individual chicken breast, avocado, or loaf will differ. Cuts of meat vary most, because fat trim varies most.
• Brands differ from generic entries. Anything processed — bread, peanut butter, yoghurt, mince — should be read off its own label when you have one. The generic row is for when you do not.
• Grams of protein are not the whole story. Amino acid profile and digestibility differ between sources, and diets built largely on plant protein generally need a somewhat higher total and more variety to cover the essential amino acids.
• Fibre is inside the carbohydrate figure. If you track net carbohydrate, subtract the fibre column yourself; do not add it.
• Cooking method adds what the table does not show. Oil absorbed while frying and fat added in a pan are real calories that no entry for the plain food includes. Olive oil is 884 calories per 100 g, and a tablespoon is around 14 g of it.