High-protein foods ranked by protein per 100 calories

Of the 169 foods in the Mealbird app, cod gives the most protein for its calories: 24.3 g of protein per 100 kcal. Then come whey protein powder (22.2 g), canned tuna (21.1 g), egg whites (21.0 g) and tilapia (20.4 g), with chicken breast (18.8 g) and pork tenderloin (18.3 g) close behind. Beans, lentils and soy have a median of 6.6 g, and nuts and seeds 3.5 g. Every figure below is the one the app plans meals with, next to the USDA record it comes from.

The top 20 by protein per 100 calories

Grams of protein for every 100 kcal the food carries: the higher the number, the less of the day’s calories that protein costs. The per-100 g columns are the food as you buy it, so raw meat and fish, and dry rice, pasta and lentils.

What the ratio leaves out: how much you would have to eat

Protein per 100 kcal says how lean a food’s protein is, not how much of the food it takes. White mushrooms rank number 14 with 14.0 g per 100 kcal, but 100 g of them holds 3.1 g of protein. Here is what 30 g of protein takes, food by food, and the calories that come with it:

Vegetables are lean but light: it takes 971 g of white mushrooms or 1,049 g of fresh spinach. Peanut butter is the other way round: 135 g holds 30 g of protein and 808 kcal. Soy sauce sits at number 12 for the same reason as the mushrooms: 8.1 g of protein in 53 kcal, in a food the app measures by the tablespoon. For a whole day of meals built from these foods, see what a 150 g protein day looks like.

Why meat and fish are counted cooked

The USDA keeps separate records for raw and cooked meat. Mealbird’s amounts are the raw weight you buy, but its numbers come from the cooked record: protein stays in the meat as it cooks while water and fat leave it, so the app scales the cooked figures back to raw grams by the protein each record holds. For a fatty cut that changes the answer a lot. The biggest changes are bacon (3.5 g of protein per 100 kcal on the raw label, 7.2 g as eaten), 80/20 ground beef (7.1 to 9.9 g) and 90/10 ground beef (9.5 to 12.4 g). On its label, 100 g of raw bacon is 393 kcal; once its fat has rendered out, it is 189.

Grams of protein per 100 kcal. For every other meat and fish here the two records are at most 2.2 g apart, some higher cooked and some lower: they are separate USDA samples, and the app goes by the cooked one, since that is what you eat.

Every ingredient, by group

All 169, best first within each group. The last column is the FoodData Central ID each row’s figures come from; for meat and fish that is the cooked record, marked as such.

How this was worked out

The source is the ingredient table inside the Mealbird app, built from USDA FoodData Central’s Foundation Foods (2025-04-24) and SR Legacy (2018-04) releases, which are public domain. Each row names its FoodData Central ID; search it on FoodData Central to see the record itself.

Protein per 100 kcal is the food’s grams of protein divided by its kcal, times 100, using the per-100 g values the app plans every meal with. It is ranked on the unrounded figure and shown to one decimal. Foods count as you buy them: rice, pasta and lentils from their dry records, canned foods from their canned ones, and meat and fish from the cooked record scaled to the raw weight, as above.

The app’s table holds 170 foods. One of them (soy chunks) is not in meal plans yet, so it is left out here, which leaves 169. Table salt has no calories, so it has no ratio and sits at the end of its group.

There is no price column, on purpose. Of the 169 foods, 11 have US prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average-price series and the other 158 are estimates calibrated to them. That is close enough to plan a week’s grocery budget, which is what the app uses them for, and not close enough to rank foods by the cost of a gram of protein.

How much protein you need is a separate question: the protein calculator works it out, and how to set your protein target explains the formula behind it.

General nutrition information, not medical advice.