Which foods are highest in protein?

1.0 piece of Chicken, broiler or fryers, breast, skinless, cooked gives 55.9 g of protein. That is 112% 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

Chicken and other lean meat fill the top of this table because of how the numbers are calculated: per portion, and a portion of chicken breast is large. That is not a ranking of what belongs in your week.

The useful comparison is what a realistic serving delivers. A chicken breast is roughly 55 g of protein, a can of tuna 30 g, three eggs 18 g, a pot of Greek yogurt 15 to 20 g, a cup of cooked lentils 18 g, a block of firm tofu 20 g. Two of those in a day covers the label figure.

Plant and animal sources are not identical gram for gram, because plant proteins are lower in some amino acids, and the practical answer is variety rather than arithmetic. Beans with grains across a day covers what either one misses.

How much of a gram actually arrives

The column in this table counts what went into your mouth. Researchers can now measure what reaches the end of the small intestine, and the gap is smaller than the phrase "incomplete protein" suggests. Cooked faba beans hand over 84.1 per cent of their nitrogen, and the amino acids themselves do better than that at about 89.8 per cent. Red kidney beans in an ordinary cooked meal gave up 79.4 per cent of their essential amino acids, with threonine worst at 69 per cent. Measured the same way in the same country, egg white came out at 86.3 per cent, whole boiled egg at 89.4 and cooked meat at 92.0, and the only gap in that trio that reached statistical significance was between egg white and meat. Six to ten people per food is what these numbers rest on.

The official reason plant protein is counted lower is those two things together: the amino acid pattern, and how much of it is absorbed. That is the position of an agency review rather than a measurement, and the same review says it did not examine protein quality itself.

Unsettled. Be careful with any single number describing protein quality, because it has an assumption inside it. The same cooked faba bean scores 0.67 or 0.77 on the standard quality index depending on which factor is used to turn measured nitrogen into protein, 6.25 or the legume-specific 5.4. Both are honest. Two laboratories can publish two different answers about one food without either of them being wrong, which is a reason to read quality scores as a rough ranking rather than a measurement.

Cooking moves these numbers as well. Running chickpeas and yellow peas through an extruder, the machine that makes puffed and shaped foods, gave amino acid absorption of about 88 to 89 per cent, described as a fifth better than the same beans pressure-cooked. That comparison is across studies and across age groups rather than inside one trial, and the children measured were moderately stunted, so it may not carry to a healthy adult.

One number worth carrying to the kitchen. To put 20 g of protein on a plate from faba beans, a research kitchen had to serve 234 g of cooked bean mash. That is a full bowl. Plant sources are workable and they are bulkier per gram of protein than the table's neat rows imply.

Unsettled. Processing on the dairy side has one result and no conclusion. In a review of everything published, ultra-high-temperature milk left 8 per cent less of its dietary nitrogen in the body after a meal than microfiltered or pasteurised milk did. That comes from a single study of 25 people, inside a review that rated every study it included at moderate to high risk of bias. Four human studies have ever asked the question and no two used the same method, so the reviewers reached no conclusion about how heat treatment affects what your body does with milk protein. This is not a reason to change which milk you buy.

For simply covering what your body needs, that difference is smaller than a shelf of plant protein powders implies. Pooling every usable nitrogen-balance study ever done, the requirement came out the same whether the protein was animal, plant or mixed. Those studies disagreed with each other a great deal, so this is a flat line drawn through scattered points, and it is still the best answer anyone has, because the method is no longer used and the dataset will not grow. Building new muscle is a separate question with a different answer, and it is further down this page.

Followed over decades, people eating the most protein did not die sooner. They died slightly later, and the advantage sat with plant protein, where an extra 3 per cent of daily energy from it went with about 5 per cent lower death risk. Total and animal protein showed no link either way with dying of heart disease or cancer. All of this is observational, and people who eat more plant protein differ in many other ways, so read it as one more reason to keep beans on the list.

Myth. The old worry that protein leaches calcium out of bone does not show up where it would count. Across 20 cohort studies, more total protein went with fewer fractures rather than more, and fish protein went the same way. The dose-response line was drawn per 100 grams a day, which is far outside what anyone eats, so the direction is the finding here and the size of it is not.

Established. If you are older and losing strength, the evidence says protein plus resistance training rather than protein alone. In ten randomised trials, whey protein raised muscle mass and walking speed, and grip strength improved when training came with it.

A last note about the table itself, which will matter more in a decade than it does today. Across about 250 observations from open-air experiments at 14 sites on five continents, raising carbon dioxide over a field lowered the nitrogen and protein in the seeds of every crop except legumes, alongside less zinc and iron in most of them. That is agronomy rather than nutrition, it says nothing about what a person absorbs, and the same paper found enough variation between cultivars to hold nutrient content steady if anyone chooses to. Composition tables are a snapshot of somebody else's harvest.

One thing the table cannot show is quality. In 30 randomised trials, plant protein built slightly less muscle than animal protein, with the difference concentrated in younger adults and in non-soy sources such as rice, chia, oat and potato. Soy came out level with milk protein. If most of your protein is from plants, soy and a mix of beans, grains and nuts across the day is the version the evidence supports.

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: Protein: who genuinely needs more of it, and what the extra does not do

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 50 g. Checked 2026-09-15.