Calorie Chart: Common Foods, by Portion

How to read this chart

Every row below comes from the USDA's Standard Reference Legacy release, which is the food composition database that sits underneath most of the calorie numbers you have ever seen, including the ones in apps that do not say where they got them.¹ The database stores nutrients per 100 grams. I have scaled each food to a portion a person would actually serve themselves, using the gram weights the USDA publishes for those portions, and rounded calories to the nearest whole number and macros to one decimal place.

Cooked and raw are different foods for this purpose. Rice roughly triples in weight when you cook it, so 1 cup of cooked rice is not 1 cup of dry rice with the same calories spread thinner. Where a food is normally eaten cooked, the row says cooked and the gram weight is the cooked weight. Weigh it the way the row describes it or the number is meaningless.

The portion is the weakest link, not the calorie value. The USDA figure for a medium apple is close to exact for a 182 gram apple. Your apple is not 182 grams, and the section below on portion estimation has the measured size of that error.

These are generic foods, not products. A supermarket own-brand granola is not the USDA's homemade granola, and a chain restaurant's chicken breast has been through a brine you cannot see. Packaged food has a label; use it. This chart is for the food that arrives without one.

The chart: 154 foods, by portion

Calories are kcal. Protein, carbohydrate and fat are grams for the portion named, not per 100 grams. Rows are USDA generic entries, so a food with several common varieties (apples, potatoes, cheese) is represented by the one most people eat rather than by all of them.

Fruit

Vegetables

Bread, grains and pasta

Beans, lentils and soy

Meat, poultry and eggs

Fish and seafood

Dairy

Nuts, seeds and spreads

Fats, oils and condiments

Snacks and sweets

Drinks

Prepared and takeaway food

Peanuts sit under beans and soy rather than under nuts, because they are legumes. Everyone who has ever built one of these charts has had to decide that, and nobody has decided it in a way that pleases both botanists and shoppers.

The portion is the part you get wrong

A chart like this looks precise, and the precision is real for the wrong half of the problem. The USDA knows what 100 grams of chicken breast contains to a degree of confidence you will never need. What neither of us knows is how many grams are on your plate.

That gap has been measured. Fifty-four adults in Tokyo served themselves fourteen different foods in the amounts they normally ate. A researcher weighed each serving after they left, and the next day the participants estimated what they had taken using photographs from a food atlas. For ten of the fourteen foods the estimates differed significantly from the true weight, ranging from a 29.8% underestimate for curry sauce to a 34.0% overestimate for margarine. Just 51.6% of participants landed within 25% of the true serving size, and 81.9% within 50%.²

Read the useful number there as the spread rather than the average, which was a deceptively small 8.8% because the overestimates and underestimates partly cancelled. Half the time a person guessing a portion is out by more than a quarter. On a 600 kcal plate, a quarter is 150 kcal, which is larger than any disagreement between two food databases about what a chicken breast contains.

This was 54 young adults in one city eating Japanese foods, so treat it as a demonstration of the size of the effect rather than as your personal error rate. It matches what the wider literature finds. Held against doubly labelled water, which measures energy expenditure without asking anyone to remember anything, people under-report their intake by about 15% on a 24-hour recall and 28% on a food frequency questionnaire.³

Two things shrink that error, and neither of them is a better chart. Weighing food on a kitchen scale for a couple of weeks recalibrates your eye, and after that you can mostly stop. And logging the same way every day makes your error consistent, which is what lets a comparison between two weeks mean something even when neither week's total is true.

Why a calorie number is not a measurement

Almost every calorie figure in existence, including all 154 above, is calculated rather than measured. The food is analysed for protein, fat, carbohydrate and alcohol, and each gram is multiplied by an energy factor: roughly 4, 9, 4 and 7 kcal respectively. The system is named after Wilbur Atwater and dates to the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ It works well enough that nearly every calorie figure in the world rests on it, but it calculates rather than weighs.

The place it is known to be wrong is the row you probably scrolled to. USDA researchers fed 18 adults controlled diets containing 0, 42 or 84 grams of almonds a day for 18 days, collected all their urine and faeces, and burned the lot in a bomb calorimeter to find out how much energy actually stayed in the body. Almonds came out at 4.6 kcal per gram, or 129 kcal for a 28 gram serving, against the 168 to 170 kcal the Atwater factors predict. The factors overestimated the energy available from almonds by 32%.⁵

The same group ran walnuts and found 146 kcal per 28 gram serving against a predicted 185, an overestimate of 21%.⁶ The mechanism is that the fat inside an intact plant cell wall does not all get released during digestion, so some of it leaves the body unabsorbed.

My almond row says 162 kcal for an ounce. The best available measurement says about 129. I have left the Atwater number in the chart because it is what the packet says, what the app says and what every other chart says, and a single row that quietly used a different method would make this table internally inconsistent for no gain. But if you eat nuts daily, you are probably logging a few hundred calories a week that never made it into you. Nobody has run these experiments on most other foods, so this is not a licence to discount your whole log by 20%.

There are two more layers of slack worth knowing about, both of which run in the unhelpful direction. A US food label may declare a calorie count up to 20% below what the product contains before it is legally misbranded, and the rule sets that ceiling in one direction only.⁷ And when researchers bought 157 meals from restaurants around Boston and burned them, the meals contained 19% more energy than the database entries for the equivalent dishes, with the same dish from the same kitchen varying by an average standard deviation of 271 kcal.⁸

Using the chart to eat, rather than to count

What a table like this is actually good for is the pattern you notice reading a column downward: foods with a lot of water and fibre in them buy you a great deal of volume per calorie, and foods that are mostly fat or mostly sugar do not.

A cup of strawberries and a tablespoon of olive oil are 49 and 119 kcal. Half a cup of boiled broccoli and an ounce of crisps are 27 and 149. None of that makes olive oil bad or broccoli virtuous, and the fat column is worth reading with that in mind: the foods with the highest calorie counts here are also, mostly, the ones carrying the fat-soluble vitamins and the essential fatty acids. What the pattern does tell you is where an unplanned 200 kcal is most likely to come from, which is a fat or a sugar rather than a vegetable.

If you want to check what any of it means against a daily target, the site's calorie calculator runs the same arithmetic MyPlate uses, and the constants and their citations are published on the sources page. That target has a floor: the app will not show a daily figure below 1,200 kcal for women or 1,500 for men, taken from the NIH clinical guidelines on overweight and obesity.⁹ A chart of small numbers is not an invitation to build a day out of the smallest ones.

And if reading a table of calorie counts makes you want to eat less than you need, or if you find yourself checking numbers before you can decide whether a meal is allowed, close the page and talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian. That is a better use of your afternoon than this chart is.

Common questions

The bottom line

A calorie chart is a lookup table, and its honest job is to save you from guessing that a bagel and a slice of bread are roughly the same. They are not: 277 kcal against 67. That is the class of mistake this page fixes, and it is a real one.

What it cannot fix is the portion, which is where half the error lives, or the fact that a calculated calorie value overstates the energy you get from at least some whole foods by up to a third.⁵ Both of those are larger than the differences between one chart and another, which is why arguing about whose database is better is mostly a waste of time.

So use the numbers to learn roughly what things cost you, rather than to measure your day to the calorie. Learn which foods carry 500 kcal in a handful and which carry 50 in a bowlful, weigh things for a fortnight until you can see it without the scale, and judge whether it is working by what the bathroom scale does over a month. If a row here does not match the source I have cited for it, I would like to know.

Sources

Every figure above traces to one of these. If you find a number that doesn't match the source it claims, tell me and I'll correct it.

1. US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (2018). FoodData Central, Standard Reference Legacy Release, April 2018. USDA National Agricultural Library. Read on FoodData Central →
2. Shinozaki N, Murakami K (2022). Accuracy of estimates of serving size using digitally displayed food photographs among Japanese adults. Journal of Nutritional Science, 11:e105. Read on PubMed →
3. Freedman LS, Commins JM, Moler JE, et al. (2014). Pooled results from 5 validation studies of dietary self-report instruments using recovery biomarkers for energy and protein intake. American Journal of Epidemiology, 180(2):172-188. Read on PubMed →
4. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2003). Food energy: methods of analysis and conversion factors. FAO Food and Nutrition Paper, 77. Read the FAO report →
5. Novotny JA, Gebauer SK, Baer DJ (2012). Discrepancy between the Atwater factor predicted and empirically measured energy values of almonds in human diets. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 96(2):296-301. Read on PubMed →
6. Baer DJ, Gebauer SK, Novotny JA (2016). Walnuts consumed by healthy adults provide less available energy than predicted by the Atwater factors. Journal of Nutrition, 146(1):9-13. Read on PubMed →
7. US Food and Drug Administration (2026). Nutrition labeling of food, 21 CFR 101.9(g). Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21. Read the regulation →
8. Urban LE, Lichtenstein AH, Gary CE, et al. (2013). The energy content of restaurant foods without stated calorie information. JAMA Internal Medicine, 173(14):1292-1299. Read on PubMed →
9. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NIH (1998). Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation, and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults. NIH Publication 98-4083. Read the guidelines →

The formulas and limits behind MyPlate's own numbers, with their citations, are on the health sources page.