 In the beginning, blueberries were the best. Then walnuts took the title, then wild blueberries took it back. Then small red beans were considered the number one most antioxidant-packed foods until herbs and spices were tested. Frankly I thought it was over in 2007. Remember USDA had released a database of 277 foods? Not only 40 foods were tested, blueberries were number one, but when hundreds of foods were tested, blueberries no longer even made the top 10. I ranked them for you by serving size, and by cost, anti-oxidant bang for your buck. Mission accomplished until last year. The total antioxidant content of more than 3,000 foods, beverages, spices, herbs, and supplements used worldwide. The most comprehensive such study ever. By far, are there even 3,000 foods out there? Just looking at the first page of the 138 page chart they include with the study, you know you're in for a wild ride when they don't just include something like gooseberries or Indian gooseberries, or Indian gooseberries in a can, but even the antioxidant power of the syrup in this can of Indian gooseberries. They tested 30 different beers. For those who stay up all night wondering if there's more antioxidants in cores or Bud Light, the answer, Miller by a hair. But nothing compared evidently to Santa Claus beer from Austria, which put Guinness to shame, and all the rest. Don't laugh, the standard American diet is so pitiful that beer represents the fifth largest source of antioxidants in the United States. They measured Captain Crunch, the antioxidant content of Tootsie Rolls, everything from crispy cream to the crushed dried leaves of the African Baobab tree, the skin of an organic lemon Norwegian jungle dessert. It took them 8 years to compile all this data. With 3,139 foods tested, you can get as nitty-gritty as you want. Like those new gold kiwis? Do they have more antioxidants than the regular green ones? About three times as much. This body of work can help us decide hundreds of real-life grocery store decisions we make all the time, but it's easy to get lost in the details. Let's take a step back, which is what the researchers did. What does this body of work say about what we should eat in general? The first thing they did, table one, was to split everything into plant foods versus animal foods. Here's the plant foods, here's animal foods. On average, plant foods have 64 times more antioxidants than meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. This alone represents a powerful argument to eat a plant-based diet. Every time you eat something in this column, you miss out on an opportunity to eat something in this column. Animal foods max out at 100, plant foods go up to 289,000. Quoting from the conclusion, antioxidant-rich foods originate from the plant kingdom, while meat, fish, and other foods from the animal kingdom are low in antioxidants. Diets comprised mainly of animal-based foods are thus low in antioxidant content, while diets based mainly on a variety of plant-based foods are antioxidant-rich, due to the thousands of bioactive antioxidants phytochemicals found in plants.