The Egg White Fat Gap Is 56×. Per Calorie, Still 20×

Whole raw egg carries 9.51g of fat per 100g against raw egg white's 0.17g — 55.9 times as much. Divide both by calories and the gap is still 20.3 times: 6.65g against 0.33g per 100 calories. Both figures come from USDA FoodData Central, FDC 171287 for the whole egg and FDC 172183 for the white.

That second number is the interesting one, and it is interesting because of what usually happens. Move a fat fold-change onto a calorie denominator and it normally falls apart — we ran butter against cottage cheese and watched 79.5× drop to 8.0×, a nine-fold collapse. Here the same switch takes 55.9× down to 20.3×, a factor of 2.8. The egg white's advantage is not a calorie-density illusion. It survives the basis change that dissolves most of them.

Why this gap survives when others collapse

A per-100g fat ratio has two ingredients: how fatty each food is, and how much water each one carries. Butter against cottage cheese is mostly the second — 717 calories per 100g against 72, a tenfold difference in density that inflates every ratio you build on it.

Whole egg and egg white are 143 and 52 calories per 100g. That is 2.75 times, not ten. So when you divide out the calories you remove a 2.75× distortion and nothing more, and 55.9 ÷ 2.75 = 20.3. The arithmetic is that direct: the collapse in a fold-change on switching bases is exactly the ratio of the two foods' calorie densities, every time.

Put the other way round, the fat is doing the work here. 60.0% of a whole egg's calories are fat, against 2.9% of an egg white's. Those shares use USDA's egg-specific energy factors (9.02 calories per gram of fat, 4.36 per gram of protein, 3.68 per gram of carbohydrate), which reconcile both rows to within 1% of their published calorie figures — 143.4 against 143 for the whole egg, 51.7 against 52 for the white.

The two rows, side by side, on both bases

Read down the ratio column and the direction flips three times. The whole egg wins on fat and on protein per 100g; the white wins on protein per calorie, on sodium it loses, and on cholesterol the comparison stops being a ratio at all.

The protein reversal, which is the part people get backwards

Per 100g, whole egg has more protein than egg white — 12.6g against 10.9g. Per 100 calories, the white has 2.38 times as much: 20.96g against 8.81g. Same two rows, opposite winners, and the switch happens because the white's 10.9g is packed into 52 calories while the egg's 12.6g arrives with 143.

Across the 183 foods we can rank (see the note below on the six we hold out), raw egg white is 6th on protein per 100 calories at 20.96g, behind only five seafoods: cooked shrimp at 24.24g, raw yellowfin tuna at 22.39g, raw Atlantic cod at 21.71g, cooked blue crab at 21.57g and cooked northern lobster at 21.35g. Whole egg is 47th at 8.81g. Nothing about the egg got worse between those two sentences; the yolk simply brings its calories with it.

The practical version: to get a whole egg's 12.6g of protein from white alone you need about 116g of white, and that costs 60 calories instead of 143. You save 83 calories and you give up the yolk's fat, its cholesterol, and whatever else lives in it that these five columns don't measure.

Where each one sits among all 183 foods

On fat per 100 calories, whole egg ranks 41st of 183 at 6.65g and egg white ranks 162nd at 0.33g. Neither is at an extreme. The ceiling is 11.31g per 100 calories, shared by olive oil and salted butter, and no food can pass it: a gram of fat buys you about 9 calories, which puts roughly 11.1g behind any 100 calories made of nothing else. Whole egg sits at 59% of that limit, which makes it a moderately fatty food rather than a fat.

At the other end the floor is zero and several foods reach it. Honey is 0.00g of fat per 100 calories, raw Jerusalem artichokes 0.014g, maple syrup 0.023g, raw potato 0.117g. Egg white's 0.33g is low but it is not the bottom, and unlike everything just listed it arrives with 21g of protein per 100 calories. That combination — near the fat floor and 6th on protein — is the whole reason the food exists as a product.

The cholesterol column, stated as what it is

Whole raw egg is the single highest-cholesterol food in our dataset at 372mg per 100g — ahead of raw beef liver at 275mg and salted butter at 215mg. Egg white is 0mg. We are not printing a fold-change for that, because dividing by zero is not a comparison. All of an egg's cholesterol is in the yolk.

What that means for your blood cholesterol is a separate question, it is genuinely contested, and this dataset cannot answer it. Our rows hold composition, not outcomes. If someone has told you to watch dietary cholesterol, the 372-to-0 split is the number that matters and it is enormous. If nobody has, this row is not a reason to start.

What this data cannot tell you

Every figure here is per 100g of raw egg. Our rows hold no per-egg weights at all, which is why you will not find a "calories in one large egg" figure anywhere above — inventing one would mean guessing at a shell size we do not have. Do it yourself instead: crack the egg, weigh the contents, and multiply. Whole egg runs 1.43 calories and 0.0951g of fat per gram; white runs 0.52 calories and 0.0017g of fat per gram.

The rows are also raw, both of them. Frying an egg in oil or butter adds that fat to the plate and none of it appears above. A boiled egg is close to the raw row; a fried one is the raw row plus whatever was in the pan, and for a teaspoon of olive oil that is roughly 4.5g of fat — half again as much fat as the egg itself brought.

And the rankings hold six of our 189 rows out. One publishes a calorie figure we know is wrong, and five carry a negative carbohydrate value. None of the six is an egg, none appears in any figure on this page, and the denominator is 183 rather than 189 everywhere we rank something. We would rather show you a smaller list than a contaminated one.

A rule you can apply to the next ratio you read

A fold-change moved onto a calorie denominator shrinks by precisely one thing: the ratio of the two foods' calorie densities. Not approximately, and never by more. Butter and cottage cheese differ by ten times in density, so their fat gap fell by ten. Whole egg and egg white differ by 2.75, so theirs fell by 2.75. If you know the two calorie figures you can predict the collapse before you do any of the work.

Which also tells you when a headline ratio is real. A 55.9× fat gap between two foods of similar density is a statement about fat. The same ratio between a fat and a watery food is mostly a statement about water.

None of which is the hard part. Working out that a yolk carries the fat takes thirty seconds; keeping a record of how many yolks you actually ate this week is what nobody sustains past the fortnight, and it is the only half that changes an outcome. Sunn does that half in WhatsApp. Send a photo of the plate, or four words — "three eggs, two toast" — and the day's totals come back in the thread. No app to open, no form, no searching a database for the right kind of egg.

Elsewhere on the site: we put whole egg and egg white head-to-head on every macro, compared egg against tofu, and published the full macro breakdowns for whole egg and egg whites. For the basis question in general, we ranked all 22 dairy and egg foods both ways. And if "per 100 calories" is a new idea, the macro-counting guide starts from the beginning.