Build a Day

Pick breakfast, lunch and dinner and see which nutrient targets the day actually hits.

Two things show up quickly. A few foods, like liver, oysters, sardines and eggs, cover a big share of the list in a single serving. And once you can see the gaps, closing them is usually a matter of adding one or two specific foods, not more food overall. Start from a preset or build your own. The Close the gaps panel suggests what to add next.

The densest foods on the list

The score is the average share of 21 targets, the 20 vitamins and minerals plus EPA + DHA (sodium left out), that the food covers. Each nutrient counts for at most 100%, so a food that is huge in a single vitamin can't top the list on that alone. The two views give different answers, and both are worth seeing. Per 100 kcal, cooked greens and mushrooms win: lots of vitamin K, folate and magnesium for almost no calories. Per serving, the portion you'd actually eat, liver, oysters and fish take over. You can't eat 2,000 kcal of spinach, but one 4 oz plate of liver covers about half of it.

Fortified cereal ranks well only because vitamins and iron are sprayed onto it. It has almost no magnesium, potassium, selenium or vitamin K.

How the numbers work

• Food data comes from USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy (2018 release), as nutrients per 100 g scaled to the portion shown. Hover over a food to see the exact USDA entry. Where USDA left a nutrient blank, it's estimated (from protein for glycine, otherwise from the closest USDA entry). The Food Database marks those values with a ~. Bone broth is partly estimated: USDA has no bone broth with glycine, so its glycine is set at 22% of protein, the ratio in gelatin. The full table of foods and values is in the Food Database.
• Brand products (the jerky, protein powders, bars, sport drink and so on) use the manufacturer's nutrition label. Labels list only a few vitamins and minerals, so the rest are estimated from each product's ingredient list using USDA values, scaled to match the label's protein and fat. Meat and fish servings are 4 oz cooked; use + to go to 8 oz.
• Omega-3 and omega-6 follow the Linoleic Acid paper. EPA + DHA, the long-chain omega-3s from fish, counts as a target (500 mg a day; there's no official RDA). ALA, the plant omega-3, is shown in grey for reference only, because little of it becomes EPA or DHA. Linoleic acid is shown as a share of calories and treated as a ceiling: about 1–2% of calories covers the need, so the bar is green up to 2.5% and red past 5%. Typical Western intake is 8–10%. Eggs and chicken carry more linoleic acid than you might expect, because the animals are fed grain and soy. Sardines packed in soybean oil pick it up from the oil.
• Targets are the US RDA, or the AI where no RDA exists, for adults aged 19–50 (magnesium uses the 31+ figure). Glycine has no official target. The 10 g line comes from the Glycine / Collagen page and is an estimate, not an RDA.
• Sodium shows the 1,500 mg AI as its target, with no upper warning on purpose. The Sodium page explains why cooking at home tends to leave people short, not over.
• Upper limits are flagged for preformed vitamin A (from animal foods only; beta-carotene from plants doesn't count), copper, zinc, iron, selenium, calcium and vitamin D. They are limits on chronic daily intake. One serving of liver a week goes past the vitamin A and copper limits on the day you eat it, and that is fine.
• Absorption isn't modeled. Iron from spinach and beans is absorbed several times less well than heme iron from meat. Beta-carotene converts to retinol inefficiently, and less so in some people. Spinach's calcium is mostly bound to oxalate.
• Niacin counts preformed niacin only. The body also makes it from tryptophan, so high-protein days are undercounted.
• Vitamin D comes mainly from sun on skin, not food (see Sunlight). A red vitamin D bar on a day without fatty fish is expected.
• Not tracked: K2 and biotin (SR Legacy has no reliable values), chloride (it follows sodium almost gram for gram), and the compounds on the index without food-composition data or intake targets (butyrate, creatine, glutathione, chlorophyll, stearic acid, and the other amino acids).