Low carb vegetables: the full list, ranked by carbs

Most vegetables are low carb vegetables. That's the honest headline, and it's worth saying before any list, because people cutting carbs often get nervous about the whole vegetable aisle when only a handful of items there are worth a second thought. Leafy greens, anything in the cabbage family, zucchini and squash, mushrooms, salad vegetables — all of them sit between 2 and 7 grams of carbohydrate per 100 grams, and a realistic portion costs you less than that. The short list of ones to watch is at the bottom. Everything else, you can eat freely.

What are the lowest carb vegetables?

Ranked by total carbohydrate per 100 grams, straight from the database the tool runs on:

That's thirty vegetables and the whole range is 1.3 to 7.4 grams. The spread between the "best" and "worst" entries on this list is about six grams — roughly a teaspoon and a half of sugar, across an enormous portion. Which is why ranking them is less useful than people expect: if you're choosing between spinach and broccoli on carb grounds, you're optimizing something that doesn't matter.

Net carbs make them lower still

Vegetables are mostly fiber and water, and fiber is a carbohydrate your body doesn't digest for energy. Subtract it and the usable number drops a long way — in some cases to almost nothing:

Kale at 0.3 grams of net carbs is the headline, and it illustrates the point better than any ranking: 4.4 grams of carbohydrate in, 4.1 of it fiber, almost nothing left that counts. Whether you track net or total carbs is a choice — how many carbs per day covers when the distinction is worth making — but for vegetables specifically, total carbs overstates what you're actually absorbing.

Per portion, not per 100 grams

This is where the lists online quietly mislead. Nobody eats 100 grams of spinach; a cup of it is 30 grams. The number that matters is what a real serving costs:

A cup of spinach is one gram. You could eat a bag of it and still be under five. The leafy greens are so light that weight-based rankings make them look more significant than they are on a plate — the real cost of a big salad is close to zero, and it's the dressing that decides whether that stays true.

The vegetables to actually watch

A short list, and it's mostly things that behave like a starch:

Corn and peas are the two that trip people up, because both get filed mentally as vegetables when nutritionally they're closer to a grain and a legume. A cup of either is around 21 grams of carbohydrate, which is most of what a whole low-carb meal is supposed to cost.

Potatoes and sweet potatoes aren't on this list because they aren't really in the same conversation: a baked potato is 21.2 grams per 100 and a baked sweet potato 20.7, three times the top of this table. They're a starch you serve with a meal, not a vegetable you add to one.

Carrots and onions deserve a word in their defense. They show up on every "avoid" list and they shouldn't. A medium carrot is 5.5 grams; the onion in a pan of food is split across four portions. Neither is going to be the reason a day goes over. Brussels sprouts are in the same position — 9.6 grams by weight looks high until you notice 4.8 of it is fiber.

Does "above ground, below ground" work as a rule?

Roughly, and it's a useful shortcut when you're standing in a store without a phone. Things that grow above ground — leaves, stems, flowers, fruiting vegetables — are generally low in carbohydrate, and roots that store energy for the plant are generally higher.

The exceptions are worth knowing, because there are enough of them to catch you out. Radishes grow below ground at 4.1 grams, turnips at 7.3, and jicama at 8.8 — all perfectly fine. Meanwhile butternut squash, peas and corn all grow above ground and are the three highest things on the watch list. The rule gets you the right answer most of the time; it just isn't the reason the answer is right.

You almost can't overeat them

Here's the part that matters more than any ranking. Low carb vegetables are not just low in carbohydrate — they're low in everything, because they're mostly water. A cup of spinach is 7 calories. A cup of mushrooms is 15. A cup of zucchini is 24.

That makes them the cheapest way there is to put real volume on a plate, and volume is a large part of what makes a meal feel like a meal. Your stomach registers how much is in it, not how clever the macros were. This is the whole mechanism behind calorie density, and it's why a low-carb plate that's half vegetables is satisfying while the same meal without them is a portion of meat you finish in four minutes.

It also protects the thing most low-carb diets quietly sacrifice. Fiber is a carbohydrate, so cutting carbs tends to cut fiber with it, and the gap is already the most common shortfall in how most people eat — how much fiber per day has the numbers. Vegetables are the way out of that trade-off: kale, broccoli and Brussels sprouts deliver more fiber per calorie than anything else on a normal plate.

Putting them to work

The practical shape is simple. Take whatever protein you were going to eat, which almost certainly has no carbohydrate in it at all, and put 200 to 300 grams of anything from the first table next to it. That's a meal somewhere between 5 and 15 grams of carbs, and it's the pattern behind all seven of our high protein low carb meals.

What you don't need is a list pinned to the fridge. Learn the dozen things on the watch list, treat the rest of the vegetable aisle as free, and spend your attention on the parts of the day where the carbs actually are.