Which foods are highest in copper?
1 cup of Sesame seeds, whole, dried gives 5.88 mg of copper. That is 653% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.
Share of the Daily Value (0.9 mg) in one portion.
| Food | Portion | Amount | % DV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sesame seeds, whole, dried | 1 cup (144 g) | 5.88 mg | 653% |
| Cashew nuts, dry roasted | 1 cup, halves and whole (137 g) | 3.04 mg | 338% |
| Cashew nuts, oil roasted | 1 cup, whole (129 g) | 2.64 mg | 293% |
| Mixed nuts, oil roasted, without peanuts | 1 cup (144 g) | 2.58 mg | 287% |
| Sunflower seed kernels, oil roasted | 1 cup (135 g) | 2.44 mg | 271% |
| Oyster, eastern, wild, raw | 6 medium (84 g) | 2.4 mg | 267% |
| Sunflower seed kernels from shell, dry roasted | 1 cup (128 g) | 2.34 mg | 260% |
| Sunflower seed kernels, dry roasted | 1.0 cup (127 g) | 2.32 mg | 258% |
| Brazil nuts, dried, unblanched | 1 cup, whole (133 g) | 2.32 mg | 258% |
| Lobster, northern, cooked | 1 cup (145 g) | 2.25 mg | 250% |
This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.
What this means for you
Before you take this table too literally, look at the portions. A whole cup of sesame seeds is 144 grams. Nobody eats that. A tablespoon is about 9 grams, and it still carries around 0.37 mg of copper, which is more than a third of a day's requirement from one spoon on a salad.
That is the useful thing about copper. The requirement is 900 micrograms a day, and seeds, nuts, shellfish, whole grains, mushrooms and dark chocolate all carry it in amounts that add up without anyone planning. Six oysters give more than two days' worth. If you eat a mixed diet, copper is already handled.
The one situation that changes this
Copper deficiency in a well-fed country almost never comes from food. It comes from zinc. High dose zinc supplements taken through a winter, or a zinc-heavy denture cream used generously, block copper absorption well enough to cause real disease.
Not for everyone. In a review of 198 published cases of spinal cord damage from copper deficiency, the two commonest causes were stomach surgery and swallowing too much zinc. After copper was replaced, only a quarter of those people improved at all, and one in twenty got back to where they started. That is the reason to take the zinc question seriously before symptoms arrive rather than after.
If you have had gastric bypass or another operation on the upper gut, copper is one of the minerals your team should be watching, along with B12 and iron. For everyone else, the seeds and nuts in this table are doing the job already.
Liver is not one food
Established. The British table puts raw liver at 0.50 mg of copper per 100 g in chicken, 1.13 in pig, 2.50 in ox, 9.67 in lamb and 20.48 in calf. That is a fortyfold range inside a single word on a menu. Across national tables it gets worse. American data give beef liver 14.5 mg per 100 g where the British table gives ox liver 2.50 mg. Whichever figure you take, one 85 gram slice lands somewhere between about 2 and 12 mg, against a daily recommendation of 0.9 mg and an American ceiling of 10 mg.
The practical version is short. Beef and calf liver are occasional food. Chicken liver at 0.57 mg per 100 g is an ordinary ingredient you can cook on a weeknight.
Cooking keeps it
Copper survives the pan. In the American retention table the factor is 100 per cent for 173 of 269 methods and the median is 100 per cent, with another 47 methods at 95 per cent. The lowest anywhere is 55 per cent and only three methods sit that low, all of them wet cooking where the liquid is discarded. Keep the cooking liquid and you keep the copper.
Who needs this table
Hardly anyone. The median American intake is 0.94 mg a day against a recommendation of 0.9 mg, and even the fifth percentile of adults reaches 0.41 mg. Shellfish, nuts, seeds, whole grains and chocolate carry copper without anybody planning for it.
Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.
Full guide: Copper: the mineral most people only hear about when zinc goes wrong
Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 0.9 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.