The Low-FODMAP Food List: What to Eat and Avoid

Search for a low-FODMAP food list and you will find dozens of them, most laid out as two columns: eat this, avoid that. They are easy to read and they will get you into trouble.

The reason is that FODMAP content is a quantity, not a property. Very few foods are safe or unsafe in themselves. Almost all of them are safe up to a point and a problem beyond it, and a list without numbers has thrown away the part that decides.

The single rule that matters most

A low-FODMAP food eaten in a large enough portion is a high-FODMAP meal.

Sweet potato is low FODMAP at 75 g and high at 150 g — the difference between half a small one and a whole medium one. Avocado is fine at an eighth and a problem at half. Blueberries are safe at about twenty berries and not at a bowl.

This has a second consequence that catches people out even when they are being careful: FODMAPs stack. Three foods, each just inside its own limit, eaten in one meal, can add up to a load that causes symptoms. Nothing on the plate was wrong. The plate was.

That is why every recipe on this site states a serving size, and why the serving size is not a suggestion.

Vegetables

Safe at a normal serving	Threshold worth knowing	Avoid in elimination
Carrot, potato, cucumber, lettuce	Unrestricted	Onion — all kinds
Courgette / zucchini	65 g	Garlic
Red bell pepper	75 g	Cauliflower
Green beans	75 g, about 15 beans	Mushrooms (common)
Bok choy	75 g cooked	Leek bulb
Aubergine / eggplant	75 g	Asparagus
Spinach, kale	75 g	Sugar snap peas
Common tomato	1 medium	Artichoke
Butternut squash	30 g	Spring onion — white bulb
Sweet potato	75 g	Celery over 10 g

Onion and garlic are the two that matter most, because they are in everything. Not just as visible ingredients — as stock, as “natural flavouring”, as seasoning on crisps, as the base of almost every sauce in a jar.

Two workarounds do most of the heavy lifting. Garlic-infused oil is safe: fructans are water-soluble and do not migrate into oil, so the flavour comes across and the trigger stays behind. The green tops of spring onions and leeks are safe while the white bulbs are not, and they give you a genuine allium note.

Fruit

Safe at a normal serving	Threshold	Avoid in elimination
Strawberries	65 g	Apple
Oranges, mandarins	1 medium	Pear
Kiwi	2 small	Mango
Grapes	150 g	Watermelon
Pineapple	140 g	Cherries
Blueberries	40 g, about 20 berries	Peach, plum, nectarine
Raspberries	60 g	Dried fruit, most kinds
Cantaloupe melon	90 g	Apricot
Banana, unripe	1 medium	Banana, very ripe

Ripeness genuinely changes the answer. A firm banana is low FODMAP; the same banana a week later, brown-speckled, has converted starch into fructans and is not. Dried fruit is a portion problem more than a food problem — drying removes water and concentrates everything left behind, so a handful of raisins is several servings of grape.

Grains and starches

Wheat, rye and barley are the main exclusions, and it is the fructans that are the issue rather than the gluten. This is worth being clear about: the low-FODMAP diet is not a gluten-free diet, and they overlap only by coincidence. Plenty of gluten-free products are high FODMAP because of what was used to replace the wheat.

Safe: rice of all kinds, oats at 1/2 cup dry, quinoa, polenta and cornmeal, buckwheat, millet, potato, rice noodles, most certified gluten-free breads and pasta.

Worth knowing: genuine spelt sourdough is low FODMAP at two slices, because the long fermentation breaks down the fructans before you eat them. The word doing the work is genuine — much supermarket “sourdough” is ordinary yeasted bread with added acidity, produced on a timescale that ferments nothing. If yeast is on the ingredients list, it will not help you.

Protein

This is the easiest category, because plain meat, fish, eggs and shellfish contain no FODMAPs whatsoever. There is no portion limit on a chicken breast.

The risk is entirely in what has been done to it. Marinades, sausages, meatballs, breadcrumbs, coatings, brines and anything labelled “seasoned” are where onion and garlic get in. Buy it plain and season it yourself.

For plant proteins the picture is narrower. Firm tofu is safe at 170 g because pressing drains the water-soluble GOS away with the whey; silken tofu is not, because nothing is drained. Tempeh is fine at 100 g. Canned lentils are low FODMAP at 1/2 cup drained and canned chickpeas only at 1/4 cup — dried and home-cooked versions of both are considerably higher.

Dairy

Lactose is the FODMAP here, so the rule is simple: the less lactose, the safer.

Safe: lactose-free milk and yoghurt, hard aged cheeses like cheddar and parmesan, brie and camembert, feta at 40 g, butter.

Avoid in elimination: ordinary cow, goat and sheep milk, soft cheeses like ricotta and cottage cheese, ordinary yoghurt, ice cream, condensed and evaporated milk.

Among the alternatives, almond, rice, hemp and macadamia milks are comfortable. Oat milk is only low FODMAP at 125 ml, which is less than most people put in a bowl of cereal. Soy milk depends entirely on how it was made: soy milk from soy protein is fine, soy milk from whole soybeans is not, and the label rarely makes it obvious.

Sweeteners

Safe: ordinary sugar, maple syrup at 2 tbsp, glucose, stevia, rice malt syrup, dark chocolate at 30 g.

Avoid: honey, agave, high-fructose corn syrup, and anything ending in -ol — sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, maltitol. The polyols are worth watching for specifically, because they turn up in sugar-free gum, mints and “diet” products where nobody is looking for them, and they are among the most reliable symptom triggers on the whole list.

Sugar itself is fine, which surprises people. Sucrose is glucose and fructose in equal measure, and the glucose carries the fructose across the gut wall. Honey has substantially more fructose than glucose, and that imbalance is exactly the problem.

Nuts and seeds

Safe: peanuts, walnuts, pecans, macadamias, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, chia, sesame.

Portion-dependent: almonds at 10 nuts, hazelnuts at 10 nuts.

Avoid: cashews and pistachios, which are high in GOS at almost any quantity.

Peanut butter is safe at 50 g, with one caveat that catches people regularly: some reduced-fat, high-protein and “gut friendly” jars add inulin or chicory root fibre, which is concentrated fructan sold as a health benefit. What you want is a jar whose ingredients read: peanuts, salt.

Look up a single food

This page is the map. When you need one specific answer — standing in a supermarket aisle holding a jar — the food checker is faster: 80 foods, searchable by name or regional alias, each with its verdict, its safe serving and the FODMAP group responsible.

How to use this list

Use it to orient yourself, not to adjudicate.

Any static list — this one included — is a snapshot of a moving target. Monash tests foods in a laboratory and revises its figures as better data arrives, and several foods have changed category over the years. Growing conditions, ripeness and processing all shift the numbers within a single food.

For the elimination phase specifically, the Monash app is worth buying. It is maintained by the research group that developed the diet, it covers thousands of foods, and it gives you the portion threshold for each rather than a colour alone.

And if a food is not on any list, the honest answer is that nobody has measured it. That is not the same as it being safe.