We ranked every fruit in our collection by nutrition. Five things the data shows.

We hold nutrition figures for every fruit in the FruitLore collection — calories, sugar, fibre, fat, protein, and where available vitamin C and potassium, all per 100 g of edible portion. Ranked together rather than read one page at a time, the set says some things that contradict what most people assume about fruit.

Figures were computed directly from the collection’s own frontmatter in August 2026; the collection grows, so exact counts move while the shape of the findings does not.

A caveat first, because it matters: these are compiled reference figures, and real fruit varies enormously with variety, ripeness, growing conditions and — for the dried and processed entries — how much water has been removed. Treat every number below as a solid central estimate, not a constant. Where the underlying data is unusually variable, we say so.

1. The median fruit is smaller than you think

Across the whole collection, the median fruit is 55 calories and 8 g of sugar per 100 g. Median fibre is 2.8 g. Median fat is 0.4 g.

That median is the useful anchor, because the range around it is enormous — calories run from 13 to 640, sugar from 0 to 66.5 g. A handful of extreme entries drag every average upward, which is exactly why “fruit is high in sugar” arguments tend to be built on dates and dried berries rather than on fruit.

Half of everything in this collection sits at or below a banana’s calorie count, and half sits at or below roughly two teaspoons of sugar per 100 g.

2. Mango and banana are above average — and nowhere near the problem

The two fruits most often accused of being sugar bombs are genuinely above the median. They are also not remotely extreme.

• Mango: 13.7 g of sugar per 100 g — the 83rd percentile of our collection.
• Banana: 12.2 g — the 81st percentile.

For comparison, cherries sit at 12.8 g, grapes at 15.5 g and figs at 16.3 g. And the actual top of the ranking is a different order of magnitude: dates at 66.5 g, more than half the fruit’s weight by sugar, because drying removes the water and concentrates everything left.

So the honest reading is that mango and banana are moderately sweet fresh fruits that happen to be dense and easy to eat a lot of. Portion size is doing more work in their reputation than concentration is. The full ranking is on our highest-sugar fruits page.

At the other end, avocado sits at 0.7 g — the 1st percentile. It is one of the least sugary things in the entire collection.

3. Calories track fat, not sugar

This is the clearest signal in the data, and it reframes the whole “high-calorie fruit” question.

Sort the collection by calories and the top is not the sweet fruits. It’s the oily ones:

Fruit	Calories	Fat	Sugar
Sapucaia	640	60 g	3 g
Coconut	354	33.5 g	6.2 g
Karuka	310	26 g	3 g
Safou	262	24.4 g	1.5 g
Avocado	160	14.7 g	0.7 g

Fat carries roughly nine calories per gram against four for sugar, so a fruit can be extremely calorie-dense while being barely sweet at all. Sapucaia — the paradise nut — is the extreme case at 60 g of fat and 3 g of sugar.

Dates get to 277 calories by the opposite route: almost no fat, and 66.5 g of sugar. Two completely different mechanisms, one ranking. Our highest-calorie fruits page separates them out.

4. One fruit in eight holds more fibre than sugar

We checked how many entries carry more grams of fibre than grams of sugar. The answer is about one in eight — forty-five of the entries that publish both figures.

The gap is widest in some genuinely unusual places:

• Baobab: 45 g fibre against 26 g sugar. The highest fibre figure in the collection by a wide margin, and it’s a dry, chalky pulp usually sold as powder.
• Avocado: 6.7 g against 0.7 g.
• Olive: 3.2 g against 0 g — the only entry with no measurable sugar at all.
• Kakadu plum: 7 g against 4 g.

The pattern is that the fibre-dominant fruits are almost all either oil-rich, dried, or eaten as a savoury ingredient rather than a sweet one. Which is a reasonable way to describe the boundary where “fruit” stops behaving like dessert.

5. Barely three dozen fruits beat an orange on vitamin C

Vitamin C is published for a little over 300 of the entries. The orange sits at 53.2 mg per 100 g, and just thirty-six of them exceed it — putting the orange itself 37th. The median across that set is 25 mg, less than half an orange.

This cuts against the usual framing. The orange’s problem was never that it’s a weak source of vitamin C; it’s a genuinely good one, sitting in the top 12% of everything we track. The problem is only that it got treated as the best, which it is not, and by a long way.

The record holder is kakadu plum at around 3000 mg — roughly sixty times an orange, though published figures for it range from about 1000 to over 5000 mg depending on harvest, so treat it as a band. Camu-camu follows near 2400 mg and acerola near 1677 mg.

But the practical winner is guava at about 228 mg: four times an orange, widely available, and pleasant to eat by the fruit rather than the capsule. The full ranking, and the camu-camu-versus-acerola question, are on our highest vitamin C fruits page.

What the whole set suggests

Read together, the collection undercuts most single-fruit superlatives. The “healthiest fruit” question doesn’t survive contact with several hundred entries measured on seven axes — the fruit that wins on vitamin C loses on fibre, the one that wins on fibre is a powder, and the calorie leader is a nut in everything but name.

What does hold up is duller and more useful: fresh fruit clusters tightly around 55 calories and 8 g of sugar, the outliers are almost all dried or oil-rich, and the differences between everyday fruits are far smaller than the marketing around them implies.

You can browse the underlying figures on any fruit page, and the ranked cuts live under compare.