Which foods are highest in selenium?

1 fillet of Rockfish, Pacific, mixed species, cooked gives 113.5 µg of selenium. That is 206% 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

Notice what is missing from the top of this table: brazil nuts. They are the densest source of selenium on earth, at 68 to 91 micrograms in a single nut, and they are not in our data at a usable portion. Anything you read about selenium and brazil nuts is about a food that delivers more than a day's requirement per nut.

What the table does show is the ordinary way people get selenium. Fish and shellfish at the top, then sunflower seeds, then meat and eggs. One fillet of rockfish is 206 per cent of the Daily Value. This is a nutrient you meet in normal meals rather than one you plan for.

The amounts in plant foods follow the soil rather than the species, so a figure measured in the United States does not transfer cleanly to bread grown elsewhere. For animal foods the variation is smaller, because farmed animals are fed a controlled diet.

The number to hold in your head is 200, not 400

Four hundred micrograms a day is the official ceiling. Something measurable happens at half of it. Across 27 randomised trials pooled into a dose-response curve, from 200 micrograms a day upwards HDL and LDL cholesterol fell and triglycerides rose, and the same pattern turned up once blood selenium passed about 150 micrograms per litre. Three brazil nuts reach the 200 mark. Nothing else on this table comes close to doing that.

The same curve ran the other way at the bottom. People who started with very little selenium looked better after supplements, people who already had enough looked worse, and the shift was sharpest in participants who were healthy at the start. From a food table that turns into one sentence. Eat the fish and the seeds without counting them, and count the brazil nuts.

Not for everyone. The ceiling of 400 micrograms a day is reachable from food here, which is unusual. A daily handful of brazil nuts is the realistic route to it, and the signs of long-term excess are hair loss, brittle nails and a garlic smell on the breath.

One thing worth knowing before you go hunting for selenium at all: deficiency on its own rarely causes obvious illness. It produced disease where the soil carried almost none, in parts of China, and in countries that import grain it is close to unheard of. This table is context rather than a task.

This is the one nutrient on the site where the table is a warning as much as a guide, and the newest evidence sharpens it. Across five randomised trials, 200 micrograms a day raised the risk of type 2 diabetes by 11 per cent. A couple of brazil nuts a day sits in that territory, and the fish and seeds in this table do not.

Brazil nuts break this table

Established. A single Brazil nut carries more selenium than an adult is advised to get in a day. USDA puts them at 1,917 micrograms per 100 g, so a 5 gram nut is about 96 micrograms against a recommendation of 55. A 28 gram handful comes to 537, past the American ceiling of 400. A cup comes to 2,550.

Worse for anyone trying to count, the nuts are not consistent with each other. Eight nuts drawn from five batches held between 0.25 and 5.06 micrograms of selenium per gram, a twentyfold range. One research group gave up on dosing people with whole nuts for that reason and switched to nut butter, where the batch variation nearly vanished. A figure for one Brazil nut is an average of things that are not alike.

What this table cannot tell you about your pan

Unsettled. Every figure here describes the food as the database lists it. How much selenium survives cooking is a question we cannot answer, because the American retention tables do not cover selenium at all. Release 6 runs to 26 nutrients across 269 cooking methods and selenium is in none of them, along with vitamins K, E and D, manganese and iodine. Nobody has measured it into a table we can read. That is a gap in what exists rather than a finding that cooking changes nothing, and we would rather say so than hand you a number we made up.

Who this list is for

Fewer people than you would expect. The median American intake is 92 micrograms a day against a recommended 55, and even the fifth percentile of adults sits at 32. Measured against the 55 microgram Daily Value, 17 per cent of adults come in under. If fish, meat, eggs, dairy or bread appear on your plate with any regularity, this table is background reading.

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: Selenium: a deficiency that kills and a supplement that does not help

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 55 µg. Checked 2026-09-15.