Which foods are highest in zinc?

6 medium of Oyster, eastern, wild, raw gives 33 mg of zinc. That is 300% 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

Oysters are in a class of their own, and after them the table is mostly beef, sesame and beans. That shape is the whole story of zinc in a diet.

The beans deserve a footnote. A cup of baked beans reads 13.5 mg, which is more than a day, but phytates in legumes and whole grains bind zinc and hold on to it, so the amount that reaches you is smaller than the amount on the label. The same portion of beef delivers more of what it promises.

That is not an argument against beans. It is the reason people eating mostly plants are advised to aim higher than the headline number, and the reason the advice to soak, sprout and leaven is everywhere. That last part has now been measured in people, and the section below is where it stops being simple.

What a day of rice actually delivered

One study shows that gap better than any explanation of it. Forty-seven children aged three to five near Dhaka ate 150 grams of rice inside their normal mixed diet, and the zinc in it was tagged with isotopes so the amount crossing into the body could be measured instead of estimated. A whole day of eating gave them between 1.1 and 1.4 mg of absorbed zinc. A one to three year old is meant to get 3 mg a day. The best of those days covered 47 per cent of it.

The same study tested the obvious fix and it did not work. When a zinc fortificant was stirred into the rice, the fraction absorbed dropped from 23 per cent to under 17, and the amount that actually reached the child came out slightly lower than with plain rice. Rice bred to grow its own zinc did better than both. More zinc in the food is not the same thing as more zinc in the person, and this is the clearest demonstration of it we have.

Read that as a measurement rather than as a verdict on rice. It was one day of feeding in 47 children, and it counted absorbed zinc rather than anything that happened to their health afterwards.

If you eat little or no meat

The intake gap is smaller than people expect. Across 26 studies, habitual vegetarians took in 0.88 mg less zinc a day than non-vegetarians and carried less zinc in their blood, with the widest gaps in women, in vegans and in poorer countries. Under a milligram is not the problem on its own. What it means is that the milligrams in this table are worth less on a plant-heavy plate, so the sensible response is to eat towards the top of it and to expect a smaller share of what the numbers promise.

Soaking and sprouting: what happened when somebody measured people

The advice to soak, sprout and ferment grains and legumes is everywhere, this site included until today. The reasoning is sound. Phytate binds zinc, those steps lower phytate, so more zinc should reach you. The last link in that chain has now been tested in people rather than in a beaker.

Myth. Sprouting your grains gets you more zinc. In healthy adults eating wheat breakfast flakes, sprouting cut the phytate by 26 per cent and raised zinc availability in the test tube 1.4-fold. How much zinc the people absorbed did not change significantly. A harsher hydrothermal treatment cut phytate by 48 per cent and raised test-tube availability almost tenfold, and still did not move absorption in people. The trialists stated the general lesson themselves: measuring phytate and test-tube availability does not tell you how much zinc a food will deliver.

Myth. Fermentation unlocks the zinc in porridge. In maize porridge prepared for Nigerian children, fermenting left the phytate statistically unchanged, 3.87 g per kg untreated against 3.35 after fermentation, and the zinc absorbed did not move either. An added phytase enzyme did cut the phytate properly, to 2.83 g per kg, and doubled zinc absorption from the meal. The step that worked is the one nobody does at home.

So the useful moves on a plant-heavy plate are the plain ones. Eat towards the top of this table, lean on sesame, pumpkin seeds, cashews and beans, and accept that you absorb a smaller share than a meat eater does. Soak and sprout for texture and cooking time if you like them. Do not count on either for zinc.

Oysters, and the one food that can take you past the ceiling

Raw oysters run 39.3 mg of zinc per 100 g, which makes one oyster about 5.9 mg. Three of them cover the entire 11 mg Daily Value. Steamed they are denser still, 7.5 mg each.

Not for everyone. A cup of raw oysters, 225 g, carries 88.4 mg of zinc, which is more than twice the 40 mg upper limit in one serving. A cup of steamed is 67.2 mg. One oyster dinner is not what that limit was written about, since it describes sustained intake. Oysters most weeks, on top of a zinc supplement taken through the winter, is how a person reaches the dose that blocks copper absorption and lowers HDL cholesterol without ever swallowing a big tablet.

Treat any oyster figure as an order of magnitude. The British and American food tables both list "Oysters, raw" and put the zinc 50 per cent apart, 59.2 mg per 100 g against 39.3. The British table also carries oysters weighed with their shells at 8.3 mg per 100 g, the same animal at a seventh of the number, because the shell is in the denominator.

One thing you can stop worrying about. Cooking barely touches zinc. Across 269 cooking methods in the USDA retention table, 226 keep 100 per cent of it, and the worst figure anywhere is 75 per cent, for pork sausage. Simmered pork loses 60 per cent of its thiamin over the same page of that table. How you cook is not a zinc question.

One note for anyone who arrived here from the cold aisle. Food is not where the cold research happens: those trials use lozenges at doses well above the 40 mg upper limit, for a few days at a time. Taking zinc every day to prevent colds gave a risk ratio of 0.93 in nine trials, which is close to nothing. Eat the oysters and the beef for the zinc, and the review of both is here.

Worth putting the supplement aisle next to this table. The daily requirement is 8 to 11 mg, six oysters carry about 33 mg, and the zinc lozenges used in cold trials carry 45 to 276 mg a day. Food and lozenges are different orders of magnitude, and only one of them is meant to be daily.

One piece of evidence worth knowing if you are here because of a wound that will not heal. In seven studies of patients with pressure sores, zinc supplements improved healing by about 44 per cent against usual nutrition care. That is a clinical setting and a supervised dose. From this table, the relevant move is simply eating enough zinc.

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: Zinc: the cold remedy that partly works, and the supplement that backfires

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 11 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.