Food calorie table: 80 foods per 100 g

How to read this table without getting it wrong

Unless stated otherwise, every value is per 100 grams of raw food, trimmed and with nothing added — no oil, no sauce, no sugar. These are rounded reference values from public food composition databases, mainly USDA FoodData Central and BEDCA: real values vary from one piece to another, between brands and between cuts, and that is fine. Counting calories is not analytical chemistry; it is orienting yourself well enough to make better decisions. If the food you are looking for is not here, there is one page per food in the food calorie lookup. Every linked food in the tables leads to its own page, with the same figures, household servings and its source. And if you want the full framework, there is the guide on counting calories without going crazy and the one on how many calories you need per day.

Meat, fish, eggs and dairy

The group with the most confusion, because the difference between cuts and between preparations is enormous: a pork loin and pork belly come from the same animal and have nothing in common. Pork belly also varies a lot depending on the ratio of lean meat to fat in each strip. Values are raw unless stated.

Grains, tubers and pulses

This is where the most expensive mistake lives. Look at the double row for rice and pasta: it is the SAME food, and the number changes almost threefold. If you write down 100 g of raw rice but you actually ate 100 g of cooked rice, you are logging 235 kcal too many. Do it the other way round and you fall short by the same amount.

Vegetables and fruit

The group where precision barely matters: apart from avocado and little else, you would have to eat enormous amounts for the figure to move your day. If you are starting out and counting feels overwhelming, start by not counting vegetables. All values are raw; dates are the exception because they are sold dried, which is why they come in at more than three times the banana.

Fats, nuts and sweets

The group that decides your day. These are dense foods: a lot of calories fit into very little volume and very little time. There is no need to fear them — olive oil and nuts are among the best things you can eat — but they do deserve a measuring spoon nearby. If you do not know how many grams your spoon holds, the kitchen measurement converter translates it for you.

Processed food and drinks

For packaged food the table is only indicative: the label rules, because every brand formulates differently. Learn to read labels and always look at the per-100 g column AND the portion the manufacturer declares, which tends to be suspiciously small.

Mistake 1: confusing raw with cooked

This is by far the failure that throws counts off most. When cooked, rice, pasta and pulses absorb water: they weigh more and therefore have fewer calories per 100 g, even though the total energy has not changed. Conversely, meat and fish LOSE water when cooked: 150 g of raw breast comes off the pan weighing around 110 g, and those 110 g cooked have the same calories as the 150 g raw, not fewer. The practical rule is simple: decide whether you weigh everything raw or everything cooked, and be consistent. Weighing raw is more precise; weighing cooked is more convenient when you cook for several people.

Mistake 2: the oil that does not appear in the table

No calorie table includes the fat you cook with, and that is where a good share of the calories you never see slip in. A level tablespoon of olive oil (around 10 g) is about 90 kcal, and a well-filled 15 ml one is around 120; a generous stir-fry takes two or three. An 80 kcal salad of vegetables can end up at 350 without changing its appearance. This is not about cooking without oil — it is quality fat and it makes food taste good and satisfy — it is about counting it: use a spoon instead of a free pour and you will know exactly how much you have.

Mistake 3: stopping at the per-100 g number

The table gives you the value per 100 g because it is the standard unit of comparison, but you do not eat 100 g of anything: you eat a 120 g banana, a 180 g steak or a 30 g handful of almonds. The step almost everyone skips is multiplying. If weighing feels like a chore, there are visual shortcuts that work surprisingly well, and we develop them in the guide on counting calories without weighing your food.

To see those multiplications done for a whole day, our 2,000-calorie meal plan weighs every ingredient in grams, with cups and ounces in brackets, and adds it up with USDA values.

Where the table falls short: mixed dishes

A table works very well with identifiable foods: a steak, an apple, a yogurt. It falls short exactly where we eat most of the time: a stew, a lasagne, a rice with things in it, the set menu at lunch. There is no row to look up, because the dish is a combination of ingredients in proportions you do not know, with an amount of oil you never saw. The realistic option is neither to give up estimating nor to take the dish apart ingredient by ingredient: it is to start from a reasonable estimate of the whole and correct it if needed.

How to estimate a real meal, step by step

1. 1

   Identify the 3 or 4 ingredients that matter

   In almost any dish, a few ingredients explain most of the calories: the protein source, the main carbohydrate and the added fat. The vegetable side almost never changes the result.

2. 2

   Decide raw or cooked and be consistent

   If the rice is cooked, use the cooked row. If you weighed the meat before the pan, use the raw one. Mixing the two is what produces errors of hundreds of kcal, like the 470 in the rice example.

3. 3

   Estimate the weight of YOUR portion

   With scales if they are to hand, and otherwise with the visual references in the table above. A fist of cooked rice, a palm of fish, a thumb of oil.

4. 4

   Add the oil and the sauces

   Count the tablespoons that went into the pan and divide between the people eating. For shop-bought sauces, go to the label: a tablespoon of mayonnaise is almost 100 kcal.

5. 5

   Round it and move on

   Your goal is a useful figure, not an exact one. If your estimate lands within 10% of the real value, it is already good enough to decide with. Chasing the last gram is the fast route to quitting.

A calorie table is an excellent pocket tool: it teaches you the order of magnitude of what you eat and removes the feeling of flying blind. But it is a map, not the territory. The territory is your plate today, with its oil, its portion and its mix of ingredients. Start by memorising four or five rows for the foods you repeat most, apply the three adjustments in this article, and for everything else let a photo do the boring work.