Nigerian soups ranked by calories

4 October 2026 · 2 min read

Soup is where a lot of the calories in a Nigerian meal hide. The swallow gets the blame, but a ladle of soup can easily carry more energy than the wrap it is eaten with.

The ranking

Soups from lightest to heaviest, per ladle

Bitterleaf Soup (Onugbu)

Ewedu is the lightest at 42 kcal a ladle. Banga Soup is the heaviest at 321 kcal, and 76% of its energy comes from fat.

Why the palm oil matters most

Fat has 9 calories a gram, more than twice as much as protein or carbohydrate. A soup made with a generous pour of palm oil can be a hundred calories or more per ladle heavier than the same soup made with less, so treat these figures as a typical home-cooked pot, not a measurement of yours.

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Spoon off the red layer on top before serving. That layer is oil.
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Take more of the vegetables and protein, and less of the oily liquid.
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Leafy soups like ewedu and efo riro are naturally lighter than seed soups like egusi and ogbono.

Every food here has its own page in our calorie guide, with protein, carbs, fat and values per 100g. There are 91 foods in it.

Browse the calorie guide →

Figures are estimates for typical home-cooked portions, from measured Nigerian portion studies, USDA FoodData Central and the FAO/INFOODS West African food tables. Not medical advice.

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