Nickel in Food: The Supposed “Health Foods” That Quietly Dominate Your Exposure

I used to highly recommend whole grains and beans for their high amounts of soluble fiber.

Why?

Because it fits perfectly into my Toxic Bile Paradigm by doing a great job of adsorbing toxic bile (which helps us excrete it via the bowels) and by helping feed the gut biome and intestinal lining (by providing short-chain fatty acids).

These foods were a significant part of my earlier Love Your Liver approach, which built its reputation by helping many people fix conditions previously thought to be “unfixable”.

When I started digging into nickel toxicity though, I had to change those recommendations in light of these new revelations.

The reasons for wanting soluble fiber didn’t disappear. I had simply learned something else about the foods we were choosing to supply it.

This is an uncomfortable part of investigating nutrition in the trailblazing (and some say fearless) way I do it. I had a good reason for recommending something, yet I was still missing a problem with it. The useful component doesn’t cancel out everything else that comes along.

I’m not interested in protecting an old recommendation from new information. I’m interested in finding out what we missed and getting to the truth of the matter.

Nickel gave me PLENTY to reconsider.

Cocoa, soybeans, nuts, seeds, and grains keep appearing in high-nickel food lists. These are not obscure ingredients that someone might encounter once on an overseas vacation. They have become the foundation of a many people’s diets. EFSA

Before we get into the individual foods, look at how the World Health Organization describes the main exposure route:

“Food is the dominant source of nickel exposure in the non-smoking, non-occupationally exposed population.”

Food. You don’t have to work in a refinery for this to be relevant.

And before somebody says, “But I buy organic,” hold that thought. There are measured examples where the organic foods contained MORE nickel than their conventional counterparts.

We’re going to look at those, too.

The nickel adds up while you’re counting something else

Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, abbreviated BfR, published a 2022 assessment using measured food concentrations. Its samples were purchased between December 2016 and May 2019.

The report states that:

“cocoa powder exhibited the maximum concentration at 11,050 μg/kg”

That is 11.05 micrograms of nickel per gram of cocoa!

What happens when we use the report’s pooled-food measurements with some realistic portions?

Food: Cocoa powder
Nickel concentration: 11.05 micrograms per gram
Illustrative portion: 10 grams
Calculated nickel: 110.5 micrograms

Food: Cashews
Nickel concentration: 5.35 micrograms per gram
Illustrative portion: 30 grams
Calculated nickel: 160.5 micrograms

Food: Sunflower seeds (an “oilseed”)
Nickel concentration: 4.75 micrograms per gram
Illustrative portion: 20 grams
Calculated nickel: 95 micrograms

Food: Dark chocolate
Nickel concentration: 2.80 micrograms per gram
Illustrative portion: 30 grams
Calculated nickel: 84 micrograms

That’s only four foods. We haven’t counted the oatmeal underneath the cocoa, the rest of breakfast, lunch, dinner, or water.

If a person ate the 90 total grams of the foods above in a day, they would be consuming 450 micrograms of nickel!

That’s a VERY HIGH nickel diet already. There would likely be significantly more nickel added with the remainder of a day’s diet.

That is the problem with looking at each ingredient separately and deciding that a little of this and a little of that can’t amount to much.

The cashews contributed more nickel than the cocoa in this example. Their concentration was lower, but the portion was larger. That’s just math.

So when somebody asks which food has the most nickel, I have another question: Which food(s) are you eating the most of?

An occasional ingredient and a daily staple are not the same exposure pattern.

Cocoa deserves particular attention because (uniformed) people are commonly moving towards more cacao/chocolate in the false hopes of improving their diet!

A 2024 study tested 155 chocolate samples from the United States market. The researchers reported:

“Cacao contents showed increasingly strong association with Cd, Co, Mn, Sr, Ni, Cu, Zn, and Mg”

“Ni” is nickel. Higher cacao content was associated with higher nickel content in the tested chocolates.

Choosing more cacao may result in less sugar, while simultaneously increasing your consumption of nickel!

One desirable feature in a food is not a permission slip to ignore the rest of the food. That includes me and my previous focus on soluble fiber, because I was unaware of the nickel that tends to come with high-fiber plant foods.

Oats and bran made this personal

Chocolate is easy to notice. The less obvious issue is the food somebody eats every morning because they believe it is helping them.

A Swedish study examining soils and cereal grains reported mean nickel concentrations of approximately 1.20 milligrams per kilogram of dry matter in oats, compared with 0.18 in winter wheat and 0.07 in spring barley. Those were the study’s results, not universal values for every grain grown everywhere.

That is a substantial difference between crops.

The study also found that grain nickel was related to soil nickel and was:

“negatively correlated with soil pH values”

In other words, lower soil pH (aka more acidic soil) was associated with higher nickel in the grain.

Then there is the question of which part of the grain remains in the food.

A 2001 wheat-milling study measured nickel in different fractions. Flour with minimal bran contained approximately 0.212–0.298 milligrams per kilogram, while bran contained 0.424–0.723 milligrams per kilogram.

The researchers wrote:

“Both metals were related to the amount of bran present in each milled fraction”

The two metals they measured were nickel and chromium. More bran was not simply “more good stuff.” More bran in whole grains results in more nickel.

This is why I’m not impressed by the Appeal to Nature fallacy-inspired argument that removing part of a food (aka refining, processing, etc.) must always make it worse.

What did you remove?

What did that part contain?

Those questions should always come before the mindless slogan.

When a whole grain becomes a daily staple, even a concentration that looks modest compared to cocoa can matter. Exposure = Concentration x Amount Consumed. You cannot leave the second half out.

No one following my work should feel obligated to keep eating whole grains and/or beans because I used to recommend them.

My duty is to evolve and update my recommendations when the information changes—not to find increasingly elaborate reasons to pretend nothing changed.

The latter is all too common with internet health influencers today, who often make themselves sick with their silly advice/practices, yet are are afraid of recanting and hurting their income streams once they realize their mistakes.

Soy, legumes, and the foods hiding behind broad categories

“Soy” is another word that covers too much territory to function as a precise nickel measurement.

EFSA’s 2020 assessment specifically identified high average nickel concentrations in soybeans and soybean flour. Its category-level findings also highlighted:

“Legumes, nuts and oilseeds”

A 2024 Korean study analyzing 147 food samples found elevated nickel in several soy products. Its reported concentrations included 0.37 milligrams per kilogram in tofu and 0.67 milligrams per kilogram in ssamjang, a fermented soybean-and-chili paste.

The authors concluded:

“The nickel content in food constantly changes depending on the food processing procedures and place of origin.”

Fermentation/culturing did not reduce the nickel content either.

Seaweed belongs in this conversation as well.

EFSA described seaweed concentrations as:

“particularly higher as compared to most other vegetable products”

“But mine are organic.”

Okay. How much nickel do they contain?

That’s a very important question.

Does organic status imply lower nickel than conventional? Or is that just an ASSumption?

The 2022 BfR MEAL paper compared organic and conventional market foods using pooled samples. Across the comparison, it found no overall statistically significant nickel difference.

Several individual organic foods contained more nickel than their conventional counterparts:

Food: Grain-based crackers
Organic version nickel, mg/kg: 0.430
Conventional version nickel, mg/kg: 0.100

Food: Rice crackers
Organic version nickel, mg/kg: 0.855
Conventional version nickel, mg/kg: 0.480

Food: Flavoured milk
Organic version nickel, mg/kg: 0.130
Conventional version nickel, mg/kg: 0.091

The organic cereal-cracker pool contained 4.3 times the nickel concentration of its conventional counterpart!

It’s very easy and attractive to shop according to a category you trust, turn your brain off for a while, and stop asking what you actually brought home. This can be disastrous though.

The comparisons don’t stop with packaged foods.

A 2026 study of fresh beetroots compared conventional, organic, and regenerative-organic samples, with 12 roots per group. The authors reported:

“organic beetroots had the highest concentrations of copper, iron, nickel, and zinc”

The conventional roots didn’t contain the most nickel. The organic roots did.

A 2024 analysis of 20 chia-seed samples also found a higher mean nickel concentration in the organic samples. The authors described:

“consumers of organic chia seeds will be exposed to higher amounts of Ni”

An earlier Indian-market comparison published in 2015 reported in its abstract:

“Level of environmental contaminants like cadmium, nickel, lead, chromium and zinc was higher in organic food samples.”

Eating organic does NOT imply reduced dietary nickel. Sometimes the organic samples contain more.

We don’t need to turn that into a declaration that every conventional food is lower. The point is that “organic” cannot answer this particular question for you.

I’ve already told the Love Your Liver audience that I have relaxed some of my own standards around buying organic all the time.

The US economy is making food more unaffordable by the day, and I don’t want people spending money that they don’t have on more expensive foods that may not actually help them in the ways they are after!

The plant still grows in soil

Once you start asking why the measurements vary so much, you end up looking at the fields.

Nickel is naturally present in the environment, and human activities add to it.

The real question is not only how much nickel exists in a soil, it’s about how much ends up in the edible portion of the plant growing there.

Agricultural inputs complicate this further. They can alter the soil, introduce contaminants, or deliberately supply metals.

The simplistic “add organic matter” to the soil is not a foolproof answer either.

A 2024 lettuce experiment tested organic materials added to soils under different nickel-contamination conditions. The researchers started with the hypothesis that the additions would reduce nickel in lettuce.

Their results were more interesting than that.

Brown coal reduced nickel in the leaves, while high peat and wheat straw increased it. Their conclusion was:

“The introduction of organic matter into mineral soil can reduce, as well as increase, nickel content in lettuce leaves.”

Different materials did different things.

I’m not going to hear “natural,” “organic,” or “good for the soil” and assume the nickel question has been answered. I want to know what happened to the nickel in the food.

Then there is the agricultural paper that really makes you stop.

A 2013 greenhouse study investigated whether applying nickel to wheat could reduce damage from glyphosate drift. Nickel sprayed onto the foliage improved several plant outcomes.

It also did this:

“Both shoot and grain Ni concentrations were enhanced by foliar Ni treatment.”

“Enhanced” means increased. The grain (this means the bran portion especially) contained more nickel.

Now the grains have glyphosate AND more nickel in them.

Oh wait, but the plants did better!!!

What the farming industry wants versus what the eater wants are NOT the same. Never have been.

I’m not keeping an old recommendation just because it was mine

The nickel toxicity revelation changed how I look at some foods I previously recommended, and my Love Your Liver Program folks are already reaping the benefits.

What I don’t want is for somebody to hear about these changes and conclude that the answer is to stop thinking about fiber, stop eating enough, or start eliminating every food that appears on any and every low-nickel internet list.

Even worse would be to follow one of the popular low-nickel diets out there that suggests eating organ meats. I cannot believe people still eat toxic detox organs, yet they do. Organ meats are high in nickel!

What have we established here?

1. We need to identify foods contributing substantial amounts of dietary nickel by concentration and amount consumed.

2. We need to distinguish recurring high-nickel food categories and generally avoid them.

3. We need to stop ASSuming that buying organic reduces our nickel exposure.

In the next article we’ll get into my version of the low-nickel diet (which is also going to be purposely low in several other toxins). That’s where I’ll get into making the information truly actionable instead of leaving everyone staring at their pantry.

For now, I want you to leave one habit behind: judging a food’s nickel content by how healthy its story sounds.