How much choline do you need per day?

The Adequate Intake for choline is 550 mg a day for adult men and 425 mg for adult women, 450 mg in pregnancy and 550 mg when breastfeeding.

These are the reference amounts used on US food labels and in dietary guidance, not personal targets. What you need shifts with age, pregnancy, medication and health conditions. The % Daily Value shown on every food page here is calculated against the FDA Daily Value for choline, which is 550 mg a day.

What this means for you

Choline is the nutrient almost nobody has heard of and almost nobody meets. The body makes some of it in the liver, and not enough to cover what it needs, so the rest has to come from food. Average intake in the United States is 402 mg a day for men against an adequate intake of 550, and 278 mg for women against 425. Among pregnant women, where the requirement is highest, roughly 90 to 95 per cent fall short.

The liver makes some choline, but not enough to cover what the body needs, so the rest has to be eaten. And the food supply for it is unusually narrow. Eggs and liver dominate. One egg carries 168 mg, about a third of a man's daily reference from a single egg. A cup of chopped hard-boiled egg is 400 mg. A 3 oz portion of cooked chicken liver is 247 mg. After that the numbers drop away into legumes and soy at roughly 150 to 200 mg per generous cup.

So the advice here is unusually specific

If you eat eggs, you are probably fine, and one a day quietly does most of the work. If you avoid eggs and liver, whether for cholesterol reasons, on a plant-based diet, or simply because you do not like them, you are in the group most likely to be short. Then legumes and soy have to do the lifting on purpose rather than by accident.

Pregnancy is where the shortfall matters most and where it is close to universal. That one is worth raising with a midwife or doctor rather than solving alone, because prenatal supplements vary enormously in whether they contain any choline at all.

Unsettled. You will see choline in scare headlines, and there is a real mechanism behind them. Gut bacteria turn some choline into TMA, which the liver converts to TMAO, a compound linked with higher cardiovascular risk. Several large observational studies have then found no significant association between choline intake and cardiovascular or peripheral artery disease. A mechanism is a hypothesis about how something might work, not a measured outcome, and the outcome data so far does not show the harm.

Not for everyone. Genuine deficiency causes muscle damage, liver damage and fatty liver disease. The upper limit of 3,500 mg a day sits far above anything food delivers. High intakes from supplements produce a fishy body odour, sweating, low blood pressure and liver toxicity. As usual the trouble is at the extremes and the useful action is in the middle.

Where the number came from

Unsettled. The adult recommendation rests on a small and blunt experiment. Adults were fed a diet with no choline in it until their livers showed damage, and 500 mg a day corrected that. Everything downstream is built on that one endpoint. In pregnancy, where the stakes are highest, a comparison of 480 against 960 mg a day found no consistent difference in outcomes, so the higher figure has nothing to recommend it over the lower.

Europe read the same ground and published one number for everybody: 400 mg a day for adults and for teenagers from 15, derived from what healthy European populations eat together with what it takes to prevent deficiency. The United States publishes 550 mg for men and 425 for women. All three figures are Adequate Intakes, which is what a body issues when it cannot derive a requirement. Treat the number on this page as a reference point rather than a target you have failed to hit.

What it takes in food

Two boiled eggs carry 268 mg, about half the American figure for men and roughly two thirds of the European 400. One egg at 134 mg puts a quarter of a day on the plate for four minutes of work. If eggs are off your plate, nothing else in the food supply does that in one step.

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.

Foods highest in choline on this site

• Egg, whole, cooked, hard-boiled — 399.6 mg per 1 cup, chopped (73% DV)
• Chicken, liver, all classes, cooked — 246.5 mg per 3 oz (45% DV)
• Eggs, whole — 168.5 mg per 1.0 egg whole without shell (31% DV)
• Chicken, giblets, cooked, simmered — 151.4 mg per 3 oz (28% DV)
• Chicken, gizzard, all classes, cooked — 151.4 mg per 1 cup chopped or dice (28% DV)

All choline sources ranked →

Full guide: Choline: the nutrient almost nobody meets, and almost nobody discusses