Leafy greens

The calorie floor is the actual argument for eating more of these. Even collards, the most calorie-dense record in the family, costs 47 calories per 100 g. Doubling or tripling a portion of any record here barely moves a daily total, which is what makes leafy greens the real lever for eating more physical food in a deficit rather than a health-halo add-on to a plate that was already decided.

These are eight different plants, not eight different calorie counts. Protein runs from 0.7 g (iceberg) to 3 g (collards) per 100 g, roughly a fourfold spread. Fiber, where the record reports it, runs from 1.6 g (baby spinach) to 4.1 g (raw kale), and sodium runs from 16 mg (iceberg) to 111 mg (baby spinach). A tracker entry called "leafy greens" that doesn't distinguish which plant you're logging throws away the exact numbers that separate them, because those numbers were never the calories.

A cup of kale is not a fixed amount of food. Raw, one cup of kale pieces weighs 20.6 g by the USDA's own portion and logs at about 7 calories. Cooked, one cup weighs 118 g, nearly six times as much mass, and logs at 36 calories per 100 g scaled to 42. Both are correctly labeled "kale, one cup." A recipe or a default tracker entry that doesn't specify raw or cooked is asking you to pick between two very different amounts of food. Weigh the state that's actually in the bowl.

Spinach's sodium is a plant fact, not a seasoning choice. Baby spinach reports 111 mg of sodium per 100 g and mature spinach reports 107 mg, both roughly seven times iceberg's 16 mg and about five times romaine's 23 mg. That sodium occurs naturally in the leaf. Swapping a spinach-based salad for a romaine or iceberg base is a larger sodium move than most substitutions people actually track.

Sugar goes unmeasured on six of the eight records, and fiber goes unmeasured on three. Only the two kale records report a sugar figure, 0.8 g raw and 1.1 g cooked. Romaine, iceberg, and cooked kale carry no fiber figure at all. The table marks all of that unavailable rather than filling it with a zero, and a meal total that treats an unavailable fiber figure as zero fiber is inventing a measurement the USDA never published.

A salad's calorie total is usually decided by what goes on top, not what's underneath. One reference-amount serving of romaine, 85 g, is 18 calories. A tablespoon of dressing measured with a spoon and the same bottle poured freehand are not the same amount of fat, and that gap is routinely larger than anything the greens themselves contribute. The olive oil page works through exactly how wide that measured-versus-poured gap runs for a cooking fat, and the same gap applies to a dressing pour. The greens rarely need weighing. The dressing does.

In a deficit, this is the category to reach for when hunger outruns the budget. A 200 g bowl of iceberg costs 34 calories. Every raw record on this page sits at or under 35 calories per 100 g except collards, at 47. None of the eight forces a real tradeoff against the rest of the day's total, which is what makes "eat more vegetables" functional advice here instead of a platitude repeated without a number behind it.

Pair with something that actually moves protein and calories, because these records won't. A high-protein salad or a chicken wrap builds a full macro total around a greens base plus a real protein source, and a tofu stir-fry does the same with a cooked green. The greens on this page were never going to supply the protein or the calories a meal needs. They supply the volume.

The decision rule for the whole page is short. Pick whichever green is actually in the kitchen, weigh it only when the total genuinely matters for the day, and put your attention on the dressing, the oil, and the protein source sitting next to it, because that's where the calories in a bowl of greens actually come from.