How many calories in a blood orange?

One medium blood orange, 131 g of it, is 62 calories. Per 100 g the fruit runs 47 calories. A cup of sections comes to 85, half a fruit to 31. The calories in blood orange are the calories in any sweet orange, because the ruby pigment that gives the fruit its name costs nothing at all.

You'd need to walk about 12 minutes to burn the 62 calories in one medium fruit (131 g).

On this page

• Blood orange quick facts
• USDA has no blood orange row, and that is fine
• What one blood orange actually weighs
• Halves, sections and the cup problem
• Juice takes the calories up and the fiber out
• The word on the label is rarely the fruit
• How does a blood orange compare?
• FAQ

Blood orange quick facts

The numbers below are for raw fruit, peeled, nothing added, from SR Legacy 169097 — USDA's summary record for commercially grown sweet oranges. The serving column is one medium fruit at 2-5/8 inches across, which USDA weighs at 131 g.

% Daily Value is based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

There is no added sugars row here, and its absence is the honest answer rather than a gap. A fruit pulled off a tree has nothing added to declare, so all 12.2 g of sugars in a medium blood orange arrived with the fruit. Total sugars carry no Daily Value on a US label either, which is why that percentage cell stays empty on every fruit page you will ever read.

The row worth a second look is fiber. One fruit hands back 3.1 g, which is 11% of the 28 g FDA Daily Value — a bigger share of the day than its carbohydrate takes up, at 6%. Potassium adds 237 mg, another 5%. Fat and sodium are both effectively zero: 0.2 g of fat and no measurable sodium in the whole fruit, against a 2,300 mg sodium Daily Value.

USDA has no blood orange row, and that is fine

Search FoodData Central for "blood orange" and you will not find the fruit. Not in the Foundation set, not in SR Legacy, not in the survey database behind national dietary statistics. This page says so out loud, because the alternative is quietly inventing a number.

Moro, Tarocco and Sanguinello — the three cultivars sold in American stores between December and April — are all Citrus sinensis, the ordinary sweet orange. What makes the flesh run from brick red to deep burgundy is anthocyanin, the same class of pigment that colors a blueberry. Pigment is not fuel. It shifts the color of the juice and none of the macros, which is why the correct record to use is the one covering all commercial varieties.

The proof is in how tightly USDA's orange records cluster:

Four calories separate every orange USDA lists. A blood orange lives inside that band, and so does a navel, and so does whatever was cheapest at the store. Anyone publishing a distinct "blood orange calorie count" is either rounding differently or making it up.

One technical note on the choice. USDA's newer laboratory records for navel oranges report 47 calories too, but they carry no figure for sugars, saturated fat or cholesterol — three rows a US nutrition panel needs. SR Legacy 169097 carries the full panel, so the whole table comes from one record instead of being stitched from two.

What one blood orange actually weighs

The small, medium and large weights are USDA's own household measures for this record, keyed to fruit diameter rather than to guesswork, and so are the ounce and the cup. The half is our own arithmetic on the per-100 g figure.

Size is the only variable that moves the number, and it moves it hard. Small to large is 45 to 86 calories — the large fruit is nearly double the small one. Blood oranges tend toward the smaller end of that range, since Moro and Tarocco are compact fruit next to a Washington navel. If you are eyeballing rather than weighing, the medium at 62 is the safer default, and the 41-calorie spread between the extremes is small enough that no one should lose an evening over it.

Halves, sections and the cup problem

Cutting a blood orange changes nothing about it. Whole in your hand, halved over a bowl, or broken into segments, a 131 g fruit is 62 calories. The unit you pick in a food log is where the count goes wrong.

USDA's cup of orange sections weighs 180 g. A medium fruit weighs 131 g. So a cup is not "an orange" — it is closer to 1.4 of them, and it lands at 85 calories, 37% above the fruit most people picture. Tap "1 cup" after eating one whole orange and you have added 23 calories that never existed. Tap "1 medium" after clearing a bowl of sections and you have hidden the same 23.

The cup does bring the macros up with it: 21.2 g of carbohydrate, 1.7 g of protein and 0.2 g of fat, against 15.4 g, 1.2 g and 0.2 g in the single fruit.

Half a fruit deserves its own line at 66 g and 31 calories, because halves are what actually happen — half sliced into a salad, half squeezed over fish, half eaten standing at the counter. It is the one portion nobody bothers to log, and at 31 calories it is also the one portion where skipping the log costs nothing worth counting.

Juice takes the calories up and the fiber out

This is the trade that matters most, and it runs in the direction people least expect.

A cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice, 248 g, is 112 calories — from SR Legacy 169098, raw juice with nothing added. That is 1.8 medium fruits' worth of calories. The fiber does not come along: raw juice holds 0.2 g per 100 g, so a full cup carries about 0.5 g, while the 1.8 fruits it replaced would have carried 5.6 g.

Squeeze a single orange and you get about 86 g of juice, or 39 calories. Three fruits fill a cup. Eating those three would have been 186 calories and 9.4 g of fiber, which is a third of the day's Daily Value; drinking them is 112 calories and almost none. Juice is not the villain here, but it is a different food, and it is the fastest way to turn a fruit that fills you up into one that does not.

Zest runs the other way. USDA's record for orange with the peel on is 63 calories per 100 g, higher than the flesh alone, but it carries 4.5 g of fiber against 2.4 g. A cup of that, 170 g, is 107 calories. In practice you are never eating a cup of peel — a teaspoon of grated blood orange zest weighs under 2 g, which is a rounding error in calories and a genuine hit of aroma in a marinade or a cake batter.

The word on the label is rarely the fruit

Here is the finding that surprised us while building this page. USDA's branded-food database holds more than 1,300 products with "blood orange" printed on them. Not one of them is a blood orange.

They are sodas, sparkling juices, lemonades, flavored yogurt and chocolate bars. An Italian-style blood orange soda runs about 39 calories per 100 mL, which by our own arithmetic puts a 330 mL can (11.2 fl oz) near 129 calories — roughly two whole fruits, with none of the fiber and none of the potassium. A dark chocolate bar flavored with blood orange sits around 489 calories per 100 g. Both are perfectly fine things to eat. Neither should be logged as fruit.

So when a search for blood orange calories turns up wildly different figures, this is usually why: half the results are describing something that was never on a tree. The fruit itself is 47 calories per 100 g and always has been. If a number is more than about 55, check whether the thing being counted is a beverage.

Fresh blood oranges, meanwhile, carry no nutrition label at all in the produce aisle, which is exactly why federal food composition data exists — and why the whole-fruit advice in MyPlate and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is written around fruit rather than around fruit flavor.

How does a blood orange compare?

Read that table by column and it reverses itself. Per 100 g the tangerine is the densest of the peeled fruits at 53, only the orange eaten with its peel is higher at 63, and the juice is the lightest at 45. Per serving the order flips completely: the tangerine becomes the smallest thing you can eat at 47 calories, and the juice becomes the biggest at 112. Density and portion are telling opposite stories, and only one of them ends up in your day.

Our take: if you want the lowest number on the plate, a tangerine wins at 47 calories, purely because USDA's medium mandarin weighs 88 g against the blood orange's 131 g. If you want the most fruit for the calories, the blood orange is the better buy — 62 calories for 3.1 g of fiber beats the navel's 69 for the same 3.1 g, and both beat the juice by a distance no serving size can close. Drink the juice because you like it, not because it is the lighter option.

Blood orange FAQs

Similar foods

• Plum — 30 cal per plum
• Cara Cara Orange — 69 cal per medium orange
• Nectarine — 31 cal for 1/2 medium
• Pineapple — 83 cal per cup chunks
• Papaya — 34 cal for 1/2 small papaya
• Apple — 95 cal per medium apple

Count it without the math

Point the camera at the fruit bowl and BodyPal logs the whole orange, the half in the salad and the glass of juice without a scale.