Food Data Insights

If I say “foods high in vitamin A”, what do you see before your eyes? Carrot jackpot 🥕🥕🥕 or digging deeper?🐰🕳️🥚

To get started with vitamin A, I’m choosing to focus right away on the form of vitamin A that is more readily used by our body: ✨Retinol✨.

Retinol isn’t just a fancy ingredient in anti-aging creams. Retinol is a gift to your body.

So, instead of looking for 🥕foods rich in vitamin A🥕, let’s focus on ✨foods rich in retinol✨.

I went down that rabbit hole and obviously, I found no carrots.

➡️ Here’s how I searched, and what I did find.

The USDA nutrient database shows over 6000 foods with retinol values. So, I ranked these foods from highest to lowest retinol and selected the top 30. To keep the list practical and relevant, I chose only one version of each food (for example, raw beef liver and not cooked beef liver), and left out fortified and processed foods with added retinol.

So, here’s a curated list of the ✨top 30 foods high in retinol✨. No, no just a list, but an interactive chart for you to play with. Go ahead, explore these foods below.

You may have heard that beef liver is one of the best, if not 𝘵𝘩𝘦 best food source of retinol, especially if you’ve been looking into animal-based diets. And yes, raw liver from New Zealand beef is at the top of the chart, just below cod liver oil.

But...

What if you don’t have access to this exclusive food?

What about liver from other animals?

What if you can’t eat or don’t want to eat any liver?

What are your options if you don’t eat meat at all?

(🥕🥕🥕 Spoiler alert: you won’t find anything plant-based in this chart…)

Have a look below and tell us in comments on LinkedIn… what’s 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 favorite retinol-containing food?