Which foods are highest in magnesium?

1 cup of Pumpkin and squash seed kernels, roasted gives 649 mg of magnesium. That is 155% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.

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.

How to read this list

Seeds and nuts fill this table from top to bottom, and the portions are generous. A cup of pumpkin seeds is 649 mg, which is a day and a half of magnesium and also a very large bowl of seeds. Scale it down to a handful and you are looking at something closer to a quarter of that, which is still a serious contribution from a snack.

What the list does not contain is as telling as what it does. There is no bread, no pasta and no rice near the top, because refining takes out the parts of the grain where magnesium lives.

Established. The wholemeal swap is a smaller win than that makes it sound. Add phytic acid to bread at the level found in wholemeal and magnesium absorption drops from 32.5 per cent to 13.0. At the level found in brown bread it drops to 24.0 per cent. Wholemeal still carries far more magnesium than white flour does, and a much smaller share of it reaches you.

One more thing this column cannot show you. The magnesium in a vegetable is partly a property of the field it grew in. Across 140 studies of peppers, content tracked soil, rainfall and average temperature, it came out lowest in the poorest regions, and it drifted downwards over the past decade. Any composition table is an average of somebody else's harvest.

Given that around half of Americans take in less magnesium than the official requirement, this is one of the few tables on the site where the honest advice is to pick something from it and eat it often.

One caution about the percentages in the right-hand column. They are worked against 400 to 420 mg a day, and that figure is under argument. Pooling every controlled balance study run at the US Department of Agriculture laboratory in Grand Forks, the intake at which the body stopped losing magnesium was 165 mg a day. For the heart, the link between dietary magnesium and fatal ischaemic heart disease flattened out above about 250 mg a day. So a food showing 40 per cent of a day here may be covering rather more of what you actually need, and getting the column to add up to 100 is not the job.

There is a second reason not to read that column as a verdict on you. The 420 mg figure is built to cover 97 to 98 people in every 100, so a reader comparing themselves against it is using a target set for the hungriest of them. Coming in under the Daily Value is a different thing from being short of magnesium, because the Daily Value was never placed where shortfall begins.

The source that is not on any list

If your water is hard, some of your magnesium arrives from the tap, and none of it appears in a food table.

Unsettled. Across ten studies, people whose drinking water was higher in magnesium died of coronary heart disease about 11 per cent less often. Nine of those ten came from Europe, seven looked backwards rather than forwards, and they disagreed with each other a great deal. Take it as a reason to stop thinking of tap water as nothing. It is not a reason to buy bottled water for your heart.

How you drink it changes what you keep. Twelve men took the same 126 mg of magnesium from mineral water over a day, either in seven small servings or in two large ones. Spread across the day they absorbed 50.7 per cent of it. In two goes, 32.4 per cent. That was water rather than food, and it is the cleanest measurement anyone has of what splitting a dose is worth.

One word on why people come looking for magnesium in the first place. Night cramps are the usual reason, and a Cochrane review of five trials in 307 older adults found magnesium changed the number of cramps a week by 0.18 against placebo. Eating the seeds is still worth it. Expecting the cramps to stop is not.

One more argument for the food column. Across 13 observational studies in 63,214 adults, people eating the most magnesium had 34 per cent less depression than those eating the least, and each extra 100 mg a day tracked with 7 per cent less. Observational data cannot show cause, and the people eating the most magnesium are also eating the most nuts, beans, greens and whole grains. Which is an argument for the food rather than for the tablet.

One reassurance about the numbers in this table. The upper limit for magnesium applies only to supplements and medicines, never to food and drink, because the gut absorbs proportionally less as intake rises and the kidneys clear the rest. A cup of pumpkin seeds is a large amount of magnesium and not a risk.

One more finding from the supplement side, for context. Seven randomised trials in 325 adults with a depressive disorder found magnesium lowered depression scores, and the reviewers said the trials are too small to act on clinically. Food remains the part of this nutrient with the solid evidence behind 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 ranking →

Full guide: Magnesium: widely under-eaten, and widely over-promised

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 420 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.