Which foods are highest in niacin (B3)?

1 cup, chopped or diced of Chicken, breast, cooked, roasted gives 19.2 mg of niacin (B3). That is 120% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.

The largest number in the table belongs to Acai berry drink, fortified at 151% of the Daily Value. It ranks there because niacin (B3) was added during manufacture rather than because the food carries it naturally, which is what the fortified label marks.

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

Niacin is one of the easiest requirements on this site to meet. A cup of roast chicken breast carries 19.2 mg, which covers a man's whole day with room to spare. Tuna, turkey, salmon, peanuts and fortified grain all land in the same territory.

There is also a second supply line most people never hear about. Your body makes niacin out of tryptophan, the amino acid in ordinary protein, so a diet with enough protein tops up niacin even when the food itself is not a niacin food. That conversion needs riboflavin, vitamin B6 and iron to work, which means a niacin problem is often really a broader shortage of food.

Where the confusion comes from

Niacin has a second life as a heart drug at doses forty times anything food delivers, and that is what most articles about it are quietly describing.

Myth. Nicotinic acid raises HDL cholesterol, so for years it was prescribed to protect the heart. Across 23 randomised trials in 39,195 people it did not reduce deaths, heart attacks or strokes, and a separate meta-analysis of 35,760 patients who already had heart disease found no protective effect either.

What makes that null result hard to believe is that niacin does move the numbers, and moves them well.

Established. Extended-release nicotinic acid lowers lipoprotein(a) by about 23 per cent, pooled across 14 trials in 9,013 people, and the trials using under 2,000 mg a day got much the same drop as the higher ones. In seven trials in 441 people it improved how well the arteries widen, by about two percentage points. Both of those are careful measurements of a blood test and a scan. Neither of them is a heart attack that did not happen.

The artery finding came with an awkward detail. The researchers looked for a link between how much the vessels improved and how much HDL, LDL or triglycerides had changed, and found none. The whole case for niacin rested on raising HDL. The one vessel effect it can still claim turned out to have no relation to HDL at all, and the outcomes that matter to a person stayed flat. That is the shape of a drug that changes the readout without changing the illness.

Pellagra, the deficiency disease, still exists, and today it is a marker of undernutrition rather than of a poor food supply. It shows up in long-term alcohol dependence, in untreated malabsorption and in severe poverty. The rash appears on skin that gets sunlight, which is why it was once mistaken for a sun allergy.

The same milligram is not the same milligram

This table shows how much niacin is in a food. How much of it you can use depends on where it came from, and the gap is large enough to change how you read the whole list.

Animal foods carry 5 to 10 mg a serving in a form the body absorbs easily. Grains carry 2 to 5 mg, and only about 30 per cent of that is available to you at all, because the niacin in cereal grains is bound to proteins, glycopeptides and polysaccharides. Fortified flour is the exception in the other direction: the niacin added to it is the free form, and it is fully available. So the enriched bread near the middle of this table is doing more for you than a whole grain sitting at the same number.

Established. There is one kitchen step known to free the bound niacin in grain, and it is not soaking, boiling or baking. It is alkaline treatment, the traditional lime-soaking of maize that makes tortillas. That single piece of food chemistry is why pellagra followed maize into Europe and North America while it stayed rare in the places where maize had always been prepared that way.

The protein route people forget

Some of your niacin is not eaten as niacin. The body builds it from tryptophan, the amino acid in protein, at roughly 60 mg of tryptophan to 1 mg of niacin. A palm-sized portion of turkey breast, about 85 g, carries roughly 180 mg of tryptophan, which is worth about 3 mg of niacin on its own, before the niacin in the meat gets counted. How much any particular person converts varies a lot, so treat that as a reason the meat and fish rows understate themselves rather than as arithmetic to rely on.

Established. Nothing in this table can hurt you. No study has ever documented harm from the niacin naturally present in food. Every reported adverse effect from niacin, the flushing, the liver trouble at high doses, all of it, comes from supplements, fortified products or medicines.

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: Niacin: the vitamin that became a heart drug and then failed the trials

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 16 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.