Lowest Calorie Solid Foods per 100g
Plain arithmetic: when you sort every solid food in the database by calories per 100g, the top of the table is broth at 7 kcal, then bamboo shoots, sour pickles and watercress at 11 kcal, and a wall of cucumbers, bok choy and lettuce right behind at 12–12. Drinks are excluded — tea and coffee would trivially win — because the question here is what you can chew.
How this ranking works
Sorted by the calorie column per 100g, low to high, from the Alkemos database rows. The scope keeps solid foods only (drinks excluded) and applies the family rules — real Arabic names, no spices, no concentrates. Ties are common at the bottom of the calorie range, so the order within equal values follows the database's own slug order, which keeps the table reproducible.
The table: top 20
Source: the Alkemos food database — the same rows each food’s page shows (per-100g values; every name links to that food’s full page).
Reading the table
The volume game
At 12–12 kcal per 100g, cucumber, bok choy and lettuce mean you can stack a 400g plate for the price of a single banana. Volume is the dieter's currency, and this end of the table mints it — the stomach registers weight and stretch, not arithmetic.
A word on the pickles
Sour pickles at 11 kcal are legitimately near the top, but the jar brought something the calorie column does not show: sodium. If your plan watches salt, read the pickle rows as "sometimes foods" and lean on the fresh vegetables instead.
Broth is a technique, not a food
Ready-to-serve beef broth registers 7 kcal per 100g, which makes it less a row in a diet and more a way to cook one: it carries flavour into vegetables and lean proteins at almost no caloric cost. Use the top of this table as ingredients, and the middle as the meal.
Common questions
Why are drinks excluded?
Because the question this page answers is about food you chew and plate. Black coffee and plain tea sit near 1 kcal per 100g and would flood the top of the table without teaching anyone anything about a meal. The database carries their pages separately, with their own values.
Does 'lowest calorie' mean 'best for weight loss'?
It means cheapest per gram, nothing more. Weight loss lives in the total day's balance, and a plate built only from this table would be huge but under-fed — too little protein to protect muscle. The satiety ranking and the protein-per-calorie ranking on this site cover the other half of that question.
Are these values raw or cooked?
Both appear — the database keeps raw and cooked measurements as separate rows, and this ranking shows whichever form the row records. The food's own page always states its state in the name, so you always know which measurement you are reading.
Turn these tables into a plan: the Calorie Calculator splits your daily budget into grams — free, no account needed.
New to this topic? Start from the curated Foods for Cutting collection — the hand-picked staples — then come back for the full ranking.