Which foods are highest in vitamin A (RAE)?

3 oz of Chicken, liver, all classes, cooked gives 3383.8 µg of vitamin A (RAE). That is 376% 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.

What this means for you

This table mixes two different things that share a name. Chicken liver at the top carries preformed vitamin A, the kind that comes ready to use and counts against the safety ceiling of 3,000 micrograms a day. Carrots, sweet potato and dark leaves carry beta-carotene, which your body converts only as it needs it. That difference is the whole safety story of this nutrient.

One three-ounce portion of chicken liver is 376 per cent of a day's vitamin A. Eaten now and then, that is fine. Eaten weekly, alongside a supplement, it stops being fine.

Not for everyone. Liver, cod liver oil and high dose supplements are the routes to too much preformed vitamin A. Above the limit it causes birth defects, and the retinoid acne medicines carry the same warning. Anyone pregnant or planning a pregnancy should treat a vitamin A supplement as a question for a doctor before it is a question for a shop.

Two true stories at once

Vitamin A is both one of the most valuable public health supplements in the world and one of the clearest examples of a pill that harmed healthy people who did not need it.

Established. Where children are short of vitamin A, a Cochrane review of 19 trials in more than 1.2 million children aged six months to five years found supplements cut deaths from any cause by 12 per cent, on high certainty evidence. In the ATBC trial of 29,133 male smokers in Finland, beta-carotene supplements raised lung cancer risk instead. Who is taking it, and why, decides which of those results applies.

Myth. That 12 per cent is often retold as vitamin A protecting children from measles and chest infections. The same review looked, and found nothing. Deaths from measles came out at a risk ratio of 0.88 and deaths from respiratory disease at 0.98, with ranges wide enough to include no effect at all. Whatever is keeping those children alive, it is not running through those two causes.

Unsettled. There is also a reason to keep liver occasional that has nothing to do with the ceiling. Pooling eight prospective studies of 283,930 adults, the people eating the most preformed vitamin A had about 29 per cent more hip fractures. Beta-carotene from vegetables showed nothing of the kind. These are observational studies, and the curve was U-shaped, so low blood retinol carried risk as well. Worth knowing, and a long way from settled.

Unsettled. That 12 per cent does not hold everywhere it has been tested. Pooling the trials run in India in children aged six months to five years, supplementation produced no drop in deaths at all, a risk ratio of 0.96 with a range that includes no effect. The same analysis lined the trials up against how much deficiency each state had and the pattern did not follow. Two readings are left. Either the global average is carried by places that do not look like India, or the real effect is smaller than the pooled number says. The data in hand cannot tell you which, and the programmes carry on while that is argued out.

For an ordinary mixed diet the practical answer is short. Orange vegetables, dark leaves, dairy and eggs cover it, liver is a treat rather than a staple, and the supplement aisle has nothing to add.

What a table value can and cannot tell you

Two numbers frame this table. The recommendation is 900 micrograms RAE a day for a man and 700 for a woman. The reason it exists is that too little vitamin A damages the cornea, and deficiency is still one of the leading preventable causes of childhood blindness.

Between the figure in the row and the vitamin A you end up with sit two steps. The first is conversion, and it varies between people more than a table admits. Five adults eating 130 to 200 g of cooked Golden Rice turned beta-carotene into retinol at about 3.8 to 1 by weight. Across those five the ratio ran from 1.9 to 1 up to 6.4 to 1. Five people is not a population, and the spread is the part to keep.

The second step is fat, and this is the one you can act on tonight. Sixteen young men ate the same raw vegetable salad with no egg, with 75 g of scrambled egg and with 150 g. On the largest of those the carotenoids from the salad came through three to eight times better, and most of them are not present in egg at all. Oil, cheese, yoghurt or nuts would be doing the same work.

Cooking is kinder than people fear and storage is harsher. Drying orange sweet potato kept at least 60 per cent of its beta-carotene whatever the method, and the variety mattered as much as the method: one kept 99 per cent after solar drying. After that it is the packet that decides, because temperature, oxygen and light are what take the carotene out during storage. The same chemistry is why fortified cooking oil is sold in sealed containers that keep the light out. Vitamin A is oxidised by air, and heat and light speed that up.

Unsettled. Whether the gentler modern processing methods help or hurt has no answer yet. High pressure processing has mostly been studied for how much carotenoid gets released, with contradictory results and no human data. Pulsed electric fields have been looked at only for vitamin C. Ultrasound, irradiation and light pulses have barely been studied at all.

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: Vitamin A: the supplement that increased cancer in a randomised trial

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 900 µg. Checked 2026-09-15.