Which foods are highest in thiamin (B1)?

1 cup of Sesame seed kernels, toasted gives 1.54 mg of thiamin (B1). That is 129% 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 Bacon, meatless at 528% of the Daily Value. It ranks there because thiamin (B1) 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

Look down the top of this list and you will notice how many of the leaders are meat substitutes and enriched flour products. That is not an accident. Thiamin is added back to refined grain by law in many countries, because taking the bran off wheat and polishing rice removes most of it. Whole grains, pork, legumes, seeds and fortified flour cover 1.2 mg a day easily.

Sesame kernels and sunflower seeds do well per 100 grams, and again the cup portion is a recipe rather than a serving. Pork is the food that carries a real amount in a real portion.

One pork chop, and what the heat takes back

A lean pork chop runs at 0.656 mg of thiamin per 100 grams. A thick chop weighs about 180 grams, so it carries 1.2 mg, which is the whole Daily Value from one piece of meat. A regular chop is 0.8 mg, a thin one 0.6 mg. There is no arithmetic to do here and no second serving needed.

Then you cook it, and some of that leaves. Simmered pork keeps 40 per cent of its thiamin if you pour the cooking liquid away, and 55 per cent if you keep it. So about a quarter of everything that survived the heat is sitting in the pan rather than on the plate. The same split runs through ground pork, cured pork and roast pork, and legumes boiled for a couple of hours show it too, 35 per cent drained against 45 per cent when the water gets used.

That is the one practical move on this page. Make the pan liquid into gravy, or cook the beans in what you are going to eat. It costs nothing and it is worth roughly a quarter of the thiamin.

Why the table says cooking adds thiamin, which it does not

If you compare food tables you will hit something that looks like a misprint. The British composition table puts raw lean pork at 0.46 mg per 100 grams and casseroled lean pork at 0.59. The American table puts cooked lean chop at 0.66. Read quickly, that says cooking creates thiamin.

It does not. Water leaves the meat during cooking, so the same thiamin is packed into fewer grams. Per 100 grams the number climbs while the amount on your plate falls. Any nutrient table that quotes per 100 grams of cooked food is doing this, for every nutrient, all the time. It is worth knowing once, because it explains a lot of confusing numbers elsewhere.

The part that matters clinically

In wealthy countries thiamin deficiency is mostly a story about alcohol rather than about diet. Long-term heavy drinking is the commonest cause, because alcohol interferes with absorption and also displaces food. Untreated, it damages nerves in the limbs in a way that does not fully reverse.

Unsettled. Thiamin is sold for heart failure on the argument that deficiency weakens the heart muscle. Two pooled analyses have now looked. Seven randomised trials in 274 people found no gain in pumping function, walking distance or symptom class, while reporting that the supplement did correct the deficiency when one was there. Eight trials in 384 people found no benefit on anything they measured, with thiamine status on that list as well. The two agree that it does nothing for the heart. They disagree about whether it even fixes the deficiency, which is a strange thing for two reviews of the same literature to disagree about, and until someone explains it the claim on the bottle has nothing behind it either way.

Fortification is the reason this is mostly not your problem

The enriched flour near the top of this table is public policy rather than a food trend. Where the same policy reaches an everyday ingredient, it shows up in people's blood.

Established. In Prey Veng province in Cambodia, pregnant women ate fish sauce fortified with thiamine for six months. Their blood thiamine finished at 282 and 254 nanomolar on the two fortified versions against 193 in the control group. The weaker sauce and the stronger one came out the same as each other, which is the lesson this vitamin keeps repeating. Putting it into a food people already buy did the work.

WHO's review of maize flour fortification records the amounts actually used where deficiency is a public-health problem. A Kenyan refugee camp got 4.4 mg of thiamine per kilogram of flour, alongside iron, folic acid and the other B vitamins. Mexican nixtamalized corn flour got 5 mg per kilogram. Those are the numbers behind the phrase enriched flour, and they are why this page is a curiosity for most readers rather than a warning.

How short are people, really

Surveys give two very different answers depending on the yardstick, and the yardstick is usually left out of the headline. American adults take in a median of 1.31 mg a day. Measured against the 1.2 mg Daily Value on labels, 42.9 per cent fall below. Measured against the requirement that the Daily Value is built out of, about 27 per cent of young women and 30 per cent of young men fall below. The Daily Value is set high enough to cover nearly everyone, so sitting under it is a normal place to be rather than a result about your health.

One medicine is worth flagging. The diuretic furosemide increases thiamin losses in urine, and levels have been measured falling into the deficient range in people taking it long term. If that is you, it is a question for the doctor who prescribed it rather than a reason to buy a bottle.

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: Thiamin: a deficiency that is mostly about alcohol, not about diet

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 1.2 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.