Our bodies are made up of molecules that contain pairs of electrons.  During everyday life, chemical reactions occur in our bodies, breaking the bonds that hold paired electrons together.  This process is what creates free radicals. This oxidative stress is thought to damage DNA and is also thought to be a part of the aging process.  Remove these free radicals and you can in theory can slow down the aging process and help prevent certain degenerative diseases, like cancer and heart disease.  This is where Antioxidants come into play.  Antioxidants are molecules that slow down the process of oxidation in our body's cells.  The source of these antioxidants is in the foods we eat.  Some foods have more antioxidants than others.  Below is a list of foods and their ORAC values.  ORAC is short for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity and is a way of measuring antioxidant capacity in foods.  All ORAC values listed below are for 100 grams of the given food item.  Keep this in mind when determining what foods are best to add to your diet to increase your antioxidant consumption.  For example, 100 grams of acai berries is easier to eat than 100 grams of dried oregano.

Below is a list of 326 foods with their ORAC values listed from highest to lowest.  lowest.  Higher ORAC values = more antioxidants.  These values are from USDA Database for the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) of elected Foods, Release 2.