 In choosing the healthiest foods, you may notice that everywhere you look, everyone seems to have a different top 10 list of the most antioxidant-rich foods, with probably dozens of competing commercial products swearing theirs is the best of the best. Some are probably just making stuff up, but genuine competing estimates arise from people citing old data, where they only test a few dozen foods or a few hundred, but other disparities arise from different labs using different tests. There are four in common usage, ORAC, TEEK, TRAP, and FRAP. USDA likes ORAC, these researchers used FRAP, in part because it's one of the quickest methods, which is important if you're doing 3,000 foods. Each has their pros and cons, but the problem with all of them is that they're just measuring how good a particular food is at altering a chemical oxidation reaction in a test tube. It's not done in a biological system, but for the first time ever, scientists at Cornell took 27 vegetables and measured their cellular antioxidant activity, their ability to quench free radicals within cells, by testing various vegetables on cultures of human liver cells. Sure, some phytonutrient may be a great antioxidant outside the cell, but what if it can't get inside the cell? That's where we need it. If you do the standard ORAC test, this is what you find. Spinach at the top, cucumber at the bottom. No surprise, dark green leafy leads the pack. But again, this is a chemical assay measuring how these foods slow down some oxidation reaction in a test tube, a reaction that actually doesn't even occur in nature. But hey, look, it's the best we had until now. And he guesses as to who was able to unseat spinach? Here's the cellular antioxidant activity. Cucumber's still at the bottom, but now, beating everyone else, beats. Number one, spinach isn't even in the top 10 anymore. All the cruciferous moved ahead, you know, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower. And hey, look, between the beets and the red bell pepper, looks like the greens got beat out by the reds.