Which Fruits Have the Most Fiber (Ranked, With Grams)

Raspberries lead at about 8 grams a cup, ahead of prunes at 7 grams per 100 grams and a pear with its skin at 5.5. Two green kiwifruit carry about 4. Form matters as much as the fruit: juicing strains out most of the fiber, and the skin holds roughly half of an apple's.

Fruit is the part of the fiber conversation nobody has to be talked into. It is already in the house, it needs no preparation, and it is the one category where the advice and the appetite point the same direction.

What is less obvious is how much the ranking moves depending on what you do to the fruit before you eat it. This page belongs to our guide to high-fiber foods.

Which fruits have the most fiber?

By the gram, raspberries lead at roughly 8 grams a cup. Prunes follow at 7 grams per 100 grams, a pear with the skin on carries about 5.5, and two green kiwifruit give you 4. Cantaloupe and pineapple sit at the bottom, near 1.4 and 2.3 grams a cup.

Fiber figures from USDA FoodData Central; exact grams vary by variety, ripeness and how you measure. This table is shorter than most because we have limited it to the fruits whose numbers we carry consistently across the rest of this site. Where we could not source a figure we would stand behind, we left the fruit out rather than round it. Every gram figure in this table resolves to a USDA FoodData Central record; the FDC IDs are listed in this page's front matter.

A note on how to read a ranking like this one. Serving sizes are doing a lot of the work: a cup of raspberries and one medium pear are not the same quantity of food, and prunes are ranked at 100 grams because that is the amount the trial used. Compare within a row rather than across the column, and the practical question is not which fruit wins but which one you will actually eat this week.

Does the fiber survive juicing, drying or blending?

Juicing removes most of it, since the pectin sits in the flesh and skin the press leaves behind. In a study of 58 adults, a whole apple eaten before lunch reduced how much they ate at that meal by 15 percent, while the same apple as juice or sauce did not. Blending keeps the fiber.

This is the part of the fruit conversation that changes the most and gets discussed the least.

Juice loses it. The fiber in fruit lives in cell walls, skin and seeds, and a press is a device for separating those from the liquid. What is left in the glass is sugar, water, acid and micronutrients.

Blending keeps it. A blender breaks cell walls open instead of straining them out, so the fiber is still in the glass, physically disrupted but present. Smoothies get lumped in with juice constantly and they are a different food.

Drying concentrates it. Prunes carry 7 grams per 100 because the water left and the fiber stayed. The same is true of the sugar, which is why dried fruit portions are smaller than they look.

The cleanest demonstration of all this gave 58 adults the same apple in three forms before lunch: whole, as sauce, and as juice.¹ The whole apple cut how much they ate at the meal that followed by 15 percent. The sauce and the juice did not. Same fruit, same grams of sugar, three different results, and the difference was the structure.

Chewing is part of the mechanism, and so is the bulk arriving in the stomach intact.

What makes berries and pears rank so high?

Seeds and skin. Raspberries are built from dozens of small drupelets, each with a seed, which is how a single cup reaches about 8 grams. A pear keeps much of its fiber in the peel. Peeled and seedless fruit loses the part that was doing the work.

A raspberry is not one fruit. It is a cluster of tiny individual fruits, each one with a seed in it, which is why the texture is what it is and why the fiber number is so far ahead of the field.

Pears and apples do it differently, through skin and through pectin in the flesh. Pectin is a gelling fiber, and it is the reason old cookbooks tell you to throw a few apple peels into jam: the pectin sets it. Commercial apple pectin is what food scientists call high-methoxyl, which means it gels only with a lot of sugar at low pH. That is a jam-making fact rather than a digestive one, and it explains why pectin behaves so differently in a pot than in a colon.

The practical consequence is the same in every case. Peel the fruit and you have thrown away a meaningful share of the reason you were eating it.

(The daily fiber we make is JamPact: psyllium husk, chia, baobab, apple fiber, green banana flour, golden flax and turkey tail mushroom, stirred into mashed fruit until it sets as real jam in about ten minutes. Two honest notes for a page about fruit. Stirring our scoop into raspberries does not make the raspberries higher in fiber; it adds fiber alongside them, and the cup of raspberries brings its own 8 grams either way. And our scoop carries 11 grams of fiber, a figure we tested before we printed it.)

Is apple actually a high-fiber fruit?

Moderately, and the skin is doing most of it. Apple's contribution is pectin, a gelling fiber. In 40 adults, two apples a day for 8 weeks lowered LDL cholesterol by about 4 percent, and a pooled analysis of 22 trials put the shift at just over 4 milligrams per decilitre.

Apple has an outsized reputation and a middling gram count, and both are fair.

It does not out-rank raspberries or a pear. What it has instead is an unusually well-studied fiber. In a trial of 40 adults, eating two apples a day for eight weeks lowered total and LDL cholesterol by around 4 percent alongside other cardiometabolic improvements.² A pooled analysis of 22 randomised trials put the LDL shift at just over 4 milligrams per decilitre, with a confidence interval that stayed on the useful side of zero.³

Two things to be careful about here, and we would rather say them than let them be assumed. Those results describe apples, the food, eaten daily for weeks. They are not a claim about any supplement, ours included, and we are not attaching them to one.

And roughly half of an apple's fiber is in the skin, which the pooled trials did not standardise and your fruit bowl does not either.

Which fruits are lowest in fiber?

Cantaloupe at roughly 1.4 grams a cup and pineapple at 2.3 are near the bottom, and juice is lower than any whole fruit. Ripe banana carries about 3 grams. Low is not a criticism here: for anyone told to eat less fiber for a while, those are the useful ones.

Melon, pineapple and very ripe banana sit at the bottom of the fruit range, and juice sits below all of them.

That matters in two opposite directions. If you are trying to close a gap, these are inefficient choices, and a cup of melon is not going to do what a cup of raspberries does.

If you have been told to reduce fiber for a stretch, before a procedure or during a flare, this same list becomes the useful one, and the fruits at the top of the table become the ones to set aside for a while. We have written that situation up separately, because the rules genuinely invert: see our page on a low-fiber diet.

As for the fruits people call worst for constipation, the honest answer is that very ripe bananas and fruit juice are the two most often blamed, and both are low-fiber rather than actively binding.

Does fruit fiber do anything the gram number does not show?

Yes, and the gram count misses it. Fruit fiber is fermented in the colon into short-chain fatty acids that feed the cells of the gut lining. Pectin also slows the stomach: at 5, 10 and 20 grams in 74 adults, fullness rose with the dose and held for up to 4 hours.

A gram is a gram on a label and not in a body.

Fruit fibers are largely fermentable, which means the bacteria in your colon break them down and make short-chain fatty acids out of them. Those compounds feed the cells lining the colon directly. Across 64 randomised trials in 2,099 adults, fiber intervention reliably raised fecal butyrate along with Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus.⁴

Pectin does something else on the way down. In 74 adults given 5, 10 or 20 grams of pectin with orange juice, reported fullness rose with the dose and lasted up to four hours.⁵ Our own evidence base calls that a modest effect and specifically not a weight-loss intervention, which is the honest framing and also ours.

And on bulk, fruit is a middling performer by design. Fruit and vegetable fibers add roughly 1.5 to 2 grams of stool weight per gram of fiber, against 3.7 for wheat bran.⁶ Bran wins that particular contest and loses several others.

The one fruit with a genuine head-to-head behind it is kiwifruit. In 79 adults with chronic constipation, two green kiwifruit a day for four weeks improved bowel movement rate and straining, and had the best tolerability and the least bloating of the three arms tested.⁷

How much fruit does it take to matter?

More than most people picture. The reference intake for women is 25 grams a day against a typical 15, and a cup of raspberries at 8 grams is the single biggest fruit contribution on this page. Two or three servings of fruit will not close that gap on their own.

Here is the arithmetic nobody puts at the top of a fruit article.

The reference intake for women is 25 grams a day and typical intake sits around 15.⁸ Suppose you have an excellent fruit day: a cup of raspberries, a pear with the skin on, two kiwifruit. That is a genuinely good showing and it comes to roughly 17 grams, which is most of the target from fruit alone and more fruit than most people eat in three days.

A realistic fruit day, one apple and a banana, lands nearer 6.

So fruit is a strong contributor and a poor sole strategy, which is the same thing that is true of every single food category. The gap gets closed by beans, oats, seeds and the skins you were going to peel off anyway.

Start where it is easiest. Buy the frozen raspberries, leave the skin on the pear, and let the rest of the plate catch up over a few weeks rather than a weekend.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Flood-Obbagy JE, Rolls BJ. The effect of fruit in different forms on energy intake and satiety at a meal. Appetite. 2009;52(2):416-422. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2008.12.001
2. Koutsos A, Riccadonna S, Ulaszewska MM, et al. Two apples a day lower serum cholesterol and improve cardiometabolic biomarkers in mildly hypercholesterolemic adults: a randomized, controlled, crossover trial. Am J Clin Nutr. 2020;111(2):307-318. doi:10.1093/ajcn/nqz282
3. Kim SJ, Anh NH, Jung CW, et al. Metabolic and Cardiovascular Benefits of Apple and Apple-Derived Products: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Front Nutr. 2022;9:766155. doi:10.3389/fnut.2022.766155
4. So D, Whelan K, Rossi M, et al. Dietary fiber intervention on gut microbiota composition in healthy adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Am J Clin Nutr. 2018;107(6):965-983. doi:10.1093/ajcn/nqy041
5. Tiwary CM, Ward JA, Jackson BA. Effect of pectin on satiety in healthy US Army adults. J Am Coll Nutr. 1997;16(5):423-428. doi:10.1080/07315724.1997.10718708
6. de Vries J, Birkett A, Hulshof T, Verbeke K, Gibes K. Effects of Cereal, Fruit and Vegetable Fibers on Human Fecal Weight and Transit Time: A Comprehensive Review of Intervention Trials. Nutrients. 2016;8(3):130. doi:10.3390/nu8030130
7. Chey SW, Chey WD, Jackson K, Eswaran S. Exploratory comparative effectiveness trial of green kiwifruit, psyllium, or prunes in US patients with chronic constipation. Am J Gastroenterol. 2021;116(6):1304-1312. doi:10.14309/ajg.0000000000001149
8. Anderson JW, Baird P, Davis RH Jr, et al. Health benefits of dietary fiber. Nutr Rev. 2009;67(4):188-205. doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2009.00189.x