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Miso soup calories, and why the number is so low

October 5, 2026 · Viral Tandel

Miso soup calories are low enough that people assume the figure must be wrong. It is not. The United States Department of Agriculture puts miso style soup at 24 kcal per 100 g, which works out to about 59 kcal for a standard cup. That is less than a slice of bread for an entire bowl of hot, salty, savoury food.

Key takeaways

• USDA publishes 24 kcal per 100 g and weighs a cup at 245 g, so a cup is about 59 kcal.
• The paste is the opposite story at 198 kcal per 100 g. You are eating a little of it, diluted in a lot of broth.
• The entry is named soup, miso or tofu, which makes it a generic figure rather than one restaurant's recipe. Treat it that way.
• Anything added to the bowl, extra tofu, noodles, a heavy hand with seaweed, lands on top of the number rather than inside it.
• Sodium, not calories, is the figure worth paying attention to in miso soup if you have a reason to watch it.

The numbers

Both figures are USDA FoodData Central. A cup of the soup is 24 multiplied by 2.45, or about 59 kcal, using the 245 g cup weight USDA publishes for that same entry.

The gap between the two rows is the whole explanation. Miso paste is a dense, fermented soybean concentrate. A bowl of miso soup is a spoonful of that paste dissolved in dashi. Almost everything in the bowl by weight is water, and water has no calories.

Why the entry says "miso or tofu"

This matters more than it looks. USDA did not publish a figure for one specific miso soup recipe. The entry covers miso style soups generally, tofu included, which is why it carries 2.21 g of protein per 100 g rather than nearly none.

So the honest reading is: 24 kcal per 100 g is a good generic figure for the small bowl of miso soup that arrives at the start of a Japanese meal. It is not a figure for a large bowl loaded with extra tofu, wakame and scallion, and it is certainly not a figure for miso ramen, which is a different dish built on noodles and is covered separately in the ramen calories breakdown.

What actually changes the number

Volume. A restaurant cup against a large soup bowl can be a two to threefold difference, and nothing about the per 100 g figure changes. Count cups.

Add-ins. Cubed tofu, clams, extra wakame and noodles each arrive with their own calories. If the bowl is a meal rather than a starter, it is no longer this entry.

Not the salt. Miso soup is high in sodium, and that is a real consideration for some people, but sodium does not add calories. If you are watching both, track them as two separate things rather than assuming a salty food must be a heavy one.

How to log it

Treat miso soup as a fixed, small line item. One cup, about 59 kcal, logged the same way every time. It is not worth agonising over, and the consistency is worth more than the precision, which is the same argument made in why photo calorie estimates run low.

Where this does get interesting is in the meal around it. A miso soup and a six piece roll from the sushi calories table is a genuinely light meal, and knowing that with real figures rather than a vague sense of healthiness is the point of logging at all.

KalTrack can read the rest of the tray and leave you to add the soup, or you can let it see the whole thing and correct what it got wrong. Try it on your next meal.

This is general information about published nutrition data, not medical advice. If you are managing blood pressure, kidney disease or any condition where sodium matters, talk to a clinician or a registered dietitian.