How to read a nutrient ranking without being misled

Rankings are useful and they are also easy to misuse. Three things are worth knowing before you act on one.

Per 100 g flatters dried and concentrated foods

Rank anything per 100 g and dried herbs, spices and powders climb to the top, because removing water concentrates everything left behind. Dried parsley is genuinely extraordinary per 100 g. You are not going to eat 100 g of dried parsley.

That is why this tool offers both bases. Per 100 g answers “which food is richest?”; per serving answers “what should I actually put on my plate?” The second question is usually the one you meant.

A high percentage is not automatically good

Two of the six nutrients here work in opposite directions. Protein, potassium, vitamin K and histidine are goals — reaching them is the point. Total sugars is a limit, and calories are neither: they are a budget you spend, and whether a high figure is welcome depends entirely on whether you are trying to gain, hold or lose weight.

A ranking says nothing about the rest of the food

A food can top the vitamin K table and still be a poor choice overall, and one nutrient in isolation is exactly the trap I wrote about in the supplements article. Ranking tells you where a nutrient is concentrated. It does not tell you what else comes with it.

Why these six nutrients

They were chosen to show what ranking is good for, not because they are the six that matter most.

  • Calories — the number everybody already tracks, useful mostly as a reference point for the others.
  • Protein — the macronutrient most people under-eat while losing weight, and the one that protects muscle when they do.
  • Total sugars — included precisely because it is a limit rather than a goal, so the ranking reads in reverse.
  • Potassium — essentially the entire US population falls short of the recommended intake from food alone.1 It matters for blood pressure, and almost nobody thinks about it.
  • Vitamin K — concentrated in a very small number of foods, so the ranking is genuinely informative rather than a long flat list.
  • Histidine — an essential amino acid with a real requirement that virtually no nutrition tool reports. It is here to make a point: the interesting questions are usually the ones nothing else will answer.
NutriRank app icon

Rank every nutrient, not just six

NutriRank is free to download. Filter by diet or by any of 16 food groups, with % Daily Values set for your age, sex and life stage.

Download on theApp Store ▶ Get it onGoogle Play

Where the numbers come from

Food composition is the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference — the dataset behind most nutrition labelling and nutrition software in the United States.2

Your personal targets come from the National Academies’ Dietary Reference Intakes: the RDA where one exists, the Adequate Intake where it does not.3,4,5 Protein and histidine are calculated per kilogram of body weight, which is why the tool asks for your weight. Calories use the Mifflin-St Jeor equation with your activity level6 — the same equation behind the metabolic rate calculator on this site.

If you skip the profile, the tool falls back to the FDA’s fixed Daily Values, which is what a food label shows.7 Those are deliberately generic. The glossary below explains the difference, because it is the single most misunderstood number in nutrition.

What the terms and abbreviations mean

Nutrition has its own shorthand and it is rarely explained to the people it is written for. Here is all of it in plain language.

% DV — percent Daily Value
How much of a day’s requirement one serving supplies. On a food label this is calculated against a single fixed reference figure chosen by the FDA for a generic adult — the same number whether you are a 19-year-old man or a 70-year-old woman. Example: the label DV for potassium is 4,700 mg for everybody.
Personalised % DV
What this tool shows once you fill in the profile. Instead of the FDA’s one-size figure it uses the DRI value for your own age, sex, weight and life stage. The percentages change — sometimes a great deal, particularly in pregnancy and breastfeeding.
DRI — Dietary Reference Intakes
The umbrella term for the nutrient reference values set by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. It contains the RDA, AI, EAR and UL below.
RDA — Recommended Dietary Allowance
The daily intake expected to meet the needs of about 97% of healthy people of a given age and sex. Deliberately set high enough to cover nearly everyone, so it is a comfortable target rather than a minimum you must hit daily.
AI — Adequate Intake
Used where the evidence is not strong enough to set an RDA. It is an observed or experimentally determined intake that appears sufficient. Potassium and vitamin K both use an AI rather than an RDA.
UL — Tolerable Upper Intake Level
The highest daily intake likely to pose no risk. Relevant when ranking, because the top of a list can reach levels you would not want to hit every day from supplements — though from whole food it is very hard to get into trouble.
Per 100 g
A like-for-like comparison of the same weight of every food. Fair, but it flatters dried and concentrated foods that nobody eats 100 g of.
Per serving
The nutrient in one typical household portion, as recorded in the USDA database — a cup, a slice, a medium fruit. Less tidy than per 100 g and usually more useful.
Essential amino acid
An amino acid your body cannot make and must obtain from food. There are nine, and histidine is one of them. Requirements are expressed per kilogram of body weight, which is why this tool asks your weight before showing histidine percentages.
USDA SR — Standard Reference
The USDA’s reference food composition database: thousands of foods, each with values for well over a hundred nutrients, measured by laboratory analysis. It underpins most nutrition labelling and software in the United States.

References

The food data, the reference values, and the equations behind every number on this page.

  1. Reider CA, Chung RY, Devarshi PP, Grant RW, Hazels Mitmesser S. Inadequacy of immune health nutrients: intakes in US adults, the 2005–2016 NHANES. Nutrients. 2020;12(6):1735. doi:10.3390/nu12061735 Source of the statement that essentially the whole US population falls short of the potassium recommendation from food alone.
  2. US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. Nutrient Data Laboratory. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ The food composition data ranked on this page. Values are laboratory-analysed and expressed per 100 g of edible portion.
  3. Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2005. doi:10.17226/10490 Protein RDA of 0.8 g/kg/day, and the histidine requirement of 14 mg/kg/day used for the amino acid target.
  4. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Sodium and Potassium. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2019. doi:10.17226/25353 The current potassium Adequate Intake — 3,400 mg for men and 2,600 mg for women, revised downward from the earlier 4,700 mg figure that food labels still use.
  5. Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Vitamin A, Vitamin K, Arsenic, Boron, Chromium, Copper, Iodine, Iron, Manganese, Molybdenum, Nickel, Silicon, Vanadium, and Zinc. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2001. doi:10.17226/10026 Vitamin K Adequate Intake: 120 µg for men, 90 µg for women.
  6. Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. Am J Clin Nutr. 1990;51(2):241–247. doi:10.1093/ajcn/51.2.241 The equation behind the personalised calorie target, chosen over Harris-Benedict because it performs better across a wider range of body weights.
  7. US Food and Drug Administration. Daily Value on the Nutrition and Supplement Facts Labels. fda.gov The fixed Daily Values used when no profile is entered, and the basis for the distinction drawn in the glossary.