The Best Low-Cholesterol Protein Is an Animal Food

Raw egg white. It carries 0mg of cholesterol per 100g and 21.0g of protein per 100 calories — the highest protein-per-calorie figure of any low-cholesterol food in our database, and it comes from a chicken. Raw sitka venison is second at 18.5g with 18mg of cholesterol, lowfat cottage cheese third at 17.2g with 4mg, canned light tuna fourth at 14.7g with 18mg. Sources are USDA FoodData Central rows — egg white is FDC 172183, venison FDC 167622, cottage cheese FDC 173417.

That order is the point of this post. The first four foods on a low-cholesterol, high-protein ranking are all animal products, and the first plant food is white mushrooms in fifth. "Cut cholesterol" is usually read as "cut animal food", and the rows do not agree. Cholesterol sits in the fat of animal foods, so the low-fat animal foods — whites, lean game, cultured dairy, water-packed fish — arrive with almost none of it and their protein intact.

The threshold we use, and why it is not ours

A food is low-cholesterol here if 100g of it contains 20mg of cholesterol or less. That is the FDA labelling threshold for the phrase, not a cut-off we picked to make a list come out well — the same rule a manufacturer has to meet before printing "low cholesterol" on a box.

Applied to our data: 150 of our foods carry a USDA cholesterol value, and 105 of them are low-cholesterol. 96 sit at exactly 0mg. Cholesterol is close to a binary property rather than a spectrum — it is made by animals, so plants are at zero and the only interesting question is which animal foods join them. That is why the second table below is short and the first one could have been a hundred rows long.

Two caveats on the counting. 33 foods hold no cholesterol figure at all and are excluded rather than counted as zero — apples, broccoli, walnuts, almonds and 29 others. Nearly all are plants that would score zero, so their absence makes the list shorter, not wrong. A second exclusion covers six rows for an unrelated reason: bison, pork belly, chicken wing, chicken drumstick, pork chop and chicken breast all hold figures we have confirmed do not stand up, so none of them enters any computation on this page until that data is repaired.

Low-cholesterol foods ranked by protein per 100 calories

The top 14 of the 105, on protein delivered per unit of energy. Protein powder and tamari clear the threshold and are left out as ingredients rather than foods.

Eight animal foods clear the FDA threshold

Of the 105 low-cholesterol rows, eight are animal foods: raw egg white (0mg), skim milk (2mg), lowfat cottage cheese (4mg), kefir (5mg), lowfat Greek yogurt (10mg), whole milk (11mg), plain yogurt (13mg) and canned light tuna (18mg). Raw sitka venison at 18mg sits in the same band and is filed by USDA under Alaska Native foods rather than under beef or game. Every one of them is either a low-fat dairy row, an egg white, or a lean muscle food — which is the pattern, not a coincidence.

The useful comparison is against the whole-egg row. Whole raw egg carries 372mg of cholesterol per 100g against the white's 0mg — all of it is in the yolk — while the white holds 10.9g of the whole egg's 12.6g of protein per 100g. Separating them removes essentially all the cholesterol and keeps 87% of the protein. It also removes most of the calories, which is why the white ranks first on this table and the whole egg does not appear on it at all.

Ranked per 100g instead, the list is unrecognisable

Sort the same 105 foods by grams of protein per 100g and the top of the table becomes seeds and nuts: hemp seeds at 31.6g, canned light tuna at 29.1g, peanut butter at 25.9g, peanuts at 25.2g, venison at 21.5g. Hemp seeds carry 553 calories per 100g, so per 100 calories they deliver 5.7g of protein and drop far down the first table. Peanut butter falls from third to 5.0g per 100 calories.

Neither ordering is the right one. Where cholesterol is the only constraint, the per-100g column is what you want — the most protein per mouthful, and hemp seeds and peanut butter genuinely deliver it. Add a calorie ceiling on top and the first table takes over, because those two foods cost 553 and 520 calories per 100g to get there.

What these numbers do not mean

This post ranks foods by measured cholesterol content. It makes no claim about what eating them does to your blood cholesterol, because our data cannot support one. Nutrition science has not settled that link, and the daily numeric cap the FDA's 20mg labelling rule was drafted against was itself withdrawn from US dietary guidance in 2015. So: if a clinician has put you on a dietary cholesterol target, this list shows what fits inside it. If nobody has, treat the ranking as a composition fact and not as advice.

Every figure is the raw or as-stored USDA row. Cooking changes them — mostly by driving off water, which raises everything per 100g — and no estimate of that shift is applied here. Where the row is already cooked or canned, the table says which.

The part that trips people up is not choosing the food; it is knowing what actually went on the plate afterwards. 100 calories of raw egg white is 192g of it, roughly six whites. Sunn does that arithmetic over WhatsApp — write "three egg whites and spinach" and the day is already totalled by the time you have put the pan down.

More reading: whole egg against egg whites in full, the egg white row, why the yolk carries the fat, cottage cheese against Greek yogurt, or the same protein-per-calorie method applied to meat, poultry and seafood.