Where the protein actually is.

Meat and fish

Figures are for cooked weight, which is what ends up on your plate. Raw meat loses roughly 25% of its weight in cooking, so 150 g of raw chicken becomes about 110 g cooked — a common source of over-counting.

Dairy and eggs

This is where the easiest wins usually are, because these foods need no cooking and are simple to add to something you were eating anyway.

A large egg is about 50 g without the shell, so roughly 6.5 g of protein each — a figure worth memorising, because eggs are one of the foods people most consistently overestimate.

Plant sources

Legume figures are for cooked weight. Dry lentils are about 25 g of protein per 100 g, but they roughly triple in weight when cooked, which is why the cooked number looks so much lower.

Why per-serving is the number that matters

Per-100 g rankings put pumpkin seeds above chicken thigh and peanut butter level with steak. That's arithmetically true and practically useless, because portion sizes aren't remotely comparable.

Peanut butter is a high-protein food by density and a minor one by portion, because you eat it a spoonful at a time and it carries about 95 calories per tablespoon while doing so. This is the trap in most "high protein foods" listicles: density and practicality are different properties.

Two questions are worth asking of any food:

• How much protein in the amount I'd actually eat?
• How many calories come with it? If you're eating in a deficit, protein per calorie matters more than protein per gram. Chicken breast, white fish, egg whites, and fat-free dairy all score exceptionally here. Nuts and cheese, despite good density, do not.

Protein quality, briefly

Not all protein is equally usable. Two things distinguish sources:

• Amino acid profile. Your body needs nine essential amino acids. Animal sources, soy and quinoa supply all nine in good proportion. Most other plant sources are low in at least one — grains in lysine, legumes in methionine.
• Digestibility. Animal proteins are typically absorbed more completely than plant proteins, where fibre and antinutrients reduce the fraction you actually get.

The old advice to carefully "combine" plant proteins within a single meal has been superseded — your body maintains a pool of amino acids and combines across the day. But the practical implication survives: if you eat mostly plants, aim somewhat higher on total protein, and make sure the sources vary.

The easiest additions

If your intake is short and you want the least disruptive fix:

• Swap regular yoghurt for Greek or skyr. Same act, roughly double the protein.
• Add eggs to breakfast. Breakfast is where most people's protein is lowest by a wide margin.
• Keep cottage cheese or quark in the fridge. Unglamorous, cheap, about 11 g per 100 g, no preparation.
• Buy tinned fish. A tin of tuna is 25 g of protein and needs nothing done to it.

About these figures

The values above are rounded typical figures of the kind published in national food composition databases, including the USDA FoodData Central and McCance & Widdowson's The Composition of Foods. Real foods vary — by cut, by brand, by fat content, by how they're cooked. Treat these as good approximations for planning, and read the label when there is one.