Purine Content of Foods: The Complete USDA 2025 Chart

Ask ten people with gout which foods to watch and you will get ten lists assembled from memory, forum posts, and a photocopied handout of unknown age. The numbers behind those lists rarely come with a source attached. This page is the opposite arrangement. Every value below comes from one US government database, published in March 2025, built by measuring purines directly in food rather than estimating them from something else.

The database is the USDA and ODS-NIH Database for the Purine Content of Foods. The US Department of Agriculture assembled it with the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health. Release 2.0, the March 2025 edition, covers 462 foods, 15 alcoholic beverages, and 14 dietary supplements. We have reproduced the food data in full, ordered so you can navigate it the way you navigate a grocery store rather than the way a chemist navigates a textbook.

Two housekeeping notes before the tables. We are a data and editorial team, not a medical team, and nothing here is a treatment recommendation — whether a particular food matters in your own case is a conversation for you and your clinician. And the numbers describe food, not people. Food composition tables tell you what is in a sample of a food. They do not tell you what that food will do to your uric acid, because that depends on how much you eat, how often, what else you eat with it, and how your kidneys handle urate. Keep that boundary in mind and this chart is genuinely useful. Forget it and the chart turns into a rulebook it was never meant to be.

What This Database Actually Is

Purine is not one compound. The database measures four bases separately — adenine, guanine, hypoxanthine, and xanthine — and reports a mean, a standard error, a minimum, and a maximum for each. The single number in our tables is the official "Total of 4 Purine Bases," expressed in milligrams per 100 grams of food.

Three details about that number are worth knowing before you read it.

It is wet weight, edible portion. Not dry weight, not as-purchased weight with bones and trim included. When you see a value for cooked pork loin, someone cooked pork loin, removed what a person would not eat, and measured what remained. That makes the numbers directly comparable to a portion on your plate, which is the point.

Every row carries its own provenance. The database reports the year the sample was analyzed and the country the sample came from. This is unusual for food composition tables and it matters: a value analyzed in 1976 in the United States and a value analyzed in 2020 in Japan are different kinds of evidence, and the database lets you see which is which instead of blending them into one anonymous figure. That is why our tables carry "Analyzed" and "Origin" columns rather than presenting the numbers as if they fell from the sky.

Some values are paired. Where the same cut of meat was measured both raw and cooked, the database marks the cooked entry to show it is the paired counterpart of a raw sample. This is why you will see "Chicken breast, boneless, skinless, raw" and "Chicken breast, boneless, skinless, cooked" a few rows apart with different numbers. They are not two opinions about chicken. They are the same food in two states, and the gap between them is mostly water loss concentrating what was already there — a point worth understanding rather than skimming, because it is also the single most misread pattern in this entire table. Heat does not create purines. It removes water and leaves the purines behind in a smaller mass. For this chart, read paired entries as one food measured twice.

The Shape of the Data

Before the full tables, here is the distribution in one view. Each figure is the median value within that food group, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth internalizing: animal muscle and organ meats sit at the top, dairy and grains sit at the bottom, and plants land somewhere in the middle.

The extremes are wider than the medians suggest. The highest single value in the US data is cooked cured bacon at 428.8 mg per 100 g; the lowest is boiled egg yolk at 0.5 mg. That is a spread of nearly three orders of magnitude inside one food supply, which is the real reason a food list beats a general rule. "Limit meat" and "limit bacon" are not the same instruction, and the gap between them is right there in the columns.

One pattern in that table is worth pausing on. The organ meats — liver, kidney, heart, brain — cluster near the top, and they do so in every species the database covers. If you were going to draw a single line through the data, it would separate organ meat from everything else before it separated any other pair of groups. The second pattern is at the bottom: dairy and eggs occupy the quietest corner of the entire database, with most entries under 10 mg.

US Foods, Complete Data

What follows is the full North American dataset — all 135 foods, in the database's own 14 groups, with no rows removed and no values adjusted. Items are listed as the database lists them, which is to say by food and preparation state rather than by brand. Numbers are milligrams of total purines per 100 grams, wet weight, edible portion.

Read the "Analyzed" and "Origin" columns as a rough confidence signal. A recent analysis year from a US sample is the most directly applicable row for a US reader. A 1976 analysis, still valid, is older methodology carried forward for completeness. The database keeps both and labels them, which is a point in its favor — a table that claims every number is equally fresh would be hiding something.

Beef Organ Products (offal)

Beef (other than organs)

Cereal grains and grain-based products

Dairy and Eggs

Finfish and shellfish

Lamb, veal, and game organ products (offal)

Lamb, veal, and game (other than organs)

Legumes and legume products

Pork organ products (offal)

Pork (other than organs)

Poultry organ products (offal)

Poultry (other than organs)

Sausages and luncheon meats

Vegetables

What the US Data Does Not Cover

Here is the limitation of the North American table, stated plainly: it is built around animal products. Of its 135 rows, 90 are meat, poultry, fish, or shellfish, and another 12 are dairy and eggs. Vegetables get seven rows. Fruit, nuts, seeds, beverages, and sweets get none at all. For a reader trying to answer "what about spinach" or "what about almonds," the US table alone is silent.

The database anticipated this. Its second food table covers 325 items drawn from non-US analytical work, and while much of it duplicates categories the US table already handles, it is the only source of coverage for plant foods. We have brought across the five groups the US table is missing — vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, beverages, and sweets — and left the rest out, because repeating meat and fish data from a different lab would add length without adding information.

Two cautions apply to everything in the next section, and both are visible in the Origin column. First, these samples were not collected in the United States. The analytical methods are sound and the database vetted them, but a spinach sample from Japan and a spinach sample from California are not the same specimen, and soil, variety, and season all move composition. Second, several entries are traditional foods with no direct US supermarket equivalent. They stay in the table for completeness; you are not expected to shop for them.

Beverages — global data

Fruits — global data

Nuts and seeds — global data

Sweets — global data

Vegetables — global data

The vegetable data deserves its own paragraph, because it is where the US table's gap was widest and where the results are most likely to be misread. The median vegetable in this dataset comes in at 20.8 mg per 100 g — low, and consistent with the US vegetable rows, which top out at 46.9 mg. But the group's maximum is 591.5 mg, for dried nori seaweed.

That is not a contradiction. It is the same water-loss effect that separates raw from cooked meat, running in the same direction but with far more force. Dried seaweed, dried shiitake mushrooms, and dried parsley concentrate whatever they contained by removing most of the water. Fresh spinach at 171.8 mg and dried shiitake at 311.6 mg are both accurate measurements of real foods; the difference is that one is mostly water and the other is not. A serving of dried seaweed is also a small fraction of the weight of a serving of spinach. The per-100-gram format is a laboratory convention, not a plate.

Fruit, at the other end, barely registers. The four fruit entries range from 2.2 to 18.4 mg, with strawberries at 2.2 and avocado at 18.4 — the highest of the group and still a fraction of any meat. Nuts and seeds land in between: chia at 58.6, almonds at 31.4, walnuts at 19.6. For context, one US row in the legume group, a soy-based product, reaches 230 mg, which is a reminder that "plant" and "low purine" are not synonyms, and that the legume and soy group is the one place where plant foods climb into animal territory. We examined that specific puzzle in a separate piece on beans and gout.

What This Chart Does Not Tell You

• It does not rank foods for you. A value is a measurement of a food sample. Your exposure depends on portion size, frequency, and everything else on the plate. A 30 mg food eaten daily and a 300 mg food eaten twice a year are not comparable events, and the chart has no way to express that difference.
• It does not distinguish association from cause. Food composition data describes what is in food. What that food does to serum uric acid involves absorption, renal handling, and individual physiology. Those links come from clinical and epidemiological research, not from composition tables, and the two should not be blended.
• It does not control for preparation. The database records what was measured, not what you will cook. Boiling, draining, and discarding cooking liquid all move the number in ways this table cannot predict for your kitchen.
• Some rows rest on thin evidence. A few entries trace to a single analysis with a sample size that would not support a strong claim. The database is transparent about this in its documentation, and so are we: a number's precision is not the same as its certainty.

How to Use It Without Overusing It

Three habits make a chart like this useful rather than misleading.

Compare within groups, not across the whole table. The most practical comparison for a reader is the one between foods that occupy the same role on the plate. Among cheeses, among breads, among fishes — those swaps are nearly free. Trading a food you eat for a food you do not eat is not a strategy.

Use the ordering, not the decimals. Whether a value is 199.6 or 202.0 changes nothing about your dinner. Whether it sits above or below the foods it would replace is the entire question. The table is a sorting tool; the third decimal place is noise.

Pair it with the rest of the picture. Purine content is one input among several that research has associated with uric acid — alcohol, fructose, hydration, body weight, and medication among them. Our overview of the everyday levers covers that wider set, and it is a better starting point than any single table.

If you want to understand what tends to set off a flare rather than what is in a food, the triggers article covers the event side. And for the question of how much a diet change can realistically move uric acid, the NEJM cohort study we summarized is the most-cited starting point in the literature.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where These Numbers Come From

All values on this page are taken without modification from Release 2.0 of the USDA and ODS-NIH Database for the Purine Content of Foods, published March 2025 by the USDA Agricultural Research Service and the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements. The database is released under CC0 1.0 and may be reused freely; the agency asks only for attribution.

The supporting documentation, including analytical methods, sample sizes, and the published literature underlying each value, is available from the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The companion paper describing the database is Wu X, Heydorn KC, Kamat M, Pehrsson PR (2025), published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis.

One clarification we make because it is a common citation error: purine values are not part of the main USDA FoodData Central nutrient database. They exist only in this dedicated database. If you cite these figures elsewhere, cite the database by its full name rather than attributing them to FoodData Central.