Asparagus vs Beans, snap, green

At just 20 calories per 100g, asparagus is one of the lowest-calorie vegetables you can eat — even lower than green beans at 31 calories. It also packs more protein (2.2g vs 1.97g), which is notable for something most people treat as a garnish. Asparagus is a legitimate nutritional powerhouse that gets overlooked because people only ever see it as the fancy side dish at restaurants.

Green beans counter with meaningfully more fiber at 3.01g per 100g, and they're significantly cheaper and more available year-round. Fresh asparagus has a narrow peak season (spring) and gets woody and fibrous when it's not fresh. Green beans are basically indestructible — frozen ones are just as good as fresh, they're a fraction of the cost, and kids will actually eat them. For everyday cooking on a budget, green beans win. For a nutrient-dense side when you want something special, asparagus takes it.

So which is actually healthier? On the numbers, neither runs away with it. Asparagus takes calories (20 vs 31 per 100g), protein (2.2g vs 1.97g) and iron — 2.14mg against 0.65mg, more than three times as much, which is genuinely unusual for a vegetable. Green beans take fiber (3.01g vs 2.1g), calcium (40mg vs 24mg) and potassium (290mg vs 202mg). That's a split decision, and the honest read is that the gap between these two is far smaller than the gap between eating either one and skipping the vegetable altogether. Choose on price, season, and which one you'll actually finish.

Both sets of figures are raw, which matters if you arrived here from a cooked-weight search: they're USDA FDC 168389, "Asparagus, raw", and FDC 2346400, "Beans, snap, green, raw". Boiling or steaming adds no calories, because water has none, but it does change what the scale reads, so cooked per-100g numbers drift from these. Weigh raw if you want your log to match this page.

One naming note, because two different vegetables get tangled here. String beans and snap beans are the same thing as green beans — the USDA name for this row is literally "Beans, snap, green" — so an asparagus-versus-string-beans comparison is this page. Asparagus beans are a third vegetable and aren't on this page at all: also sold as yardlong beans, they're a long climbing bean related to the cowpea, not to asparagus, and named for a resemblance in flavour rather than any botanical link. If that's the comparison you wanted, these numbers won't describe it.