High Volume Low Calorie Foods: Vegetables Fill the Top 16

Raw bok choy gives you the most food for the fewest calories of the 183 foods we ranked: 13 calories per 100g, so 100 calories of it weighs 769g. Raw celery (714g) and raw cucumber with the peel (667g) come next. The typical food in the same USDA-derived database weighs 84g per 100 calories, and the corn, peanut and olive oil row at the bottom weighs 11.3g.

We sorted every food by one number — grams per 100 calories — because that is what "high volume, low calorie" means once you pin it down. The answer is lopsided: the first 16 places are all vegetables.

High volume low calorie foods: the top 20

26 of our 183 foods give you at least 300g of food per 100 calories, and every one of them is a raw vegetable or a raw fruit. The first fruit is raw lemon, 17th at 345g. The last column shows how much protein that same 100 calories brings along, which matters later.

Figures are USDA FoodData Central: bok choy FDC 2685572, celery FDC 2346405, cucumber FDC 168409, white mushrooms FDC 169251. Arugula, green cabbage, cauliflower and eggplant tie at 400g, so they share 12th place and are listed alphabetically.

Which food groups give the most food per calorie?

The median vegetable in our data weighs 317.5g per 100 calories, 18 times the median nut or seed at 17.5g. Fruit is second at 192.3g. Every other group sits below the overall median of 84g. Groups with fewer than ten foods in our data are left off the table.

The first food that is not a fruit or vegetable is fat-free skim milk, 30th at 270g. The legume leader is soy sauce, which nobody eats by the bowl, so it is named here as a fact about the row and left out of the protein list below.

High volume is not the same as filling you with protein

Only four of the top 20 bring at least 10g of protein with their 100 calories: raw white mushrooms (14g), raw spinach (12.4g), raw asparagus (11g) and raw arugula (10.3g). Celery brings 3.5g and watermelon 2g. A plate built only from the top of the list is big and light, and short on protein.

So we ran a second cut: foods that still give at least 100g per 100 calories and at least 10g of protein. Outside the vegetables, ten foods make it. Soy sauce also passes on the numbers and is left out as a condiment.

Raw egg whites are the standout: 100 calories is 192g of egg white and carries 21g of protein (USDA FDC 172183). Cooked shrimp has the most protein per calorie in the table, 24.2g, but at 101g per 100 calories it is only just above the cut. In practice the two lists work together: a large pile from the first table next to a portion from this one.

What these numbers cannot tell you

"Volume" here means weight, not the space food takes up on a plate, because USDA rows give grams and our data holds no cup or density figure. A 400g bowl of raw arugula is far bigger than 400g of raw cauliflower, and this list cannot show that.

The vegetable rows are raw. Cooking drives water out, so 435g of raw spinach shrinks as it wilts — and since our data has no cooked spinach entry, we can't say what that pile weighs once it hits the pan. The grain rows, by contrast, are cooked, which is why cooked bulgur (120g) ranks so far above dry rolled oats (26g). Nothing here measures how full a food keeps you — grams per calorie is a weight, not a fullness score. Six rows are also left out of every figure: the chicken breast row, whose calories do not match its own protein, fat and carbs, and five meat rows that list a negative amount of carbohydrate.

More on these foods

The top food has its own page at bok choy nutrition, and the two runners-up go head to head in celery vs cucumber. For a full list sorted per 100g instead, see low-calorie foods. If protein is the goal, compare whole egg vs egg whites and read what 20g of protein costs in calories.

The hard part of eating this way is not the list. It is remembering, at 7pm, whether that big salad left room for dinner. Send Sunn a photo or a line on WhatsApp — "salad with shrimp" — and it logs the meal and tells you what is left in your day, without opening an app.