Antioxidants are nutrients found in food that play a crucially important role in keeping you healthy and your body working better for longer.

This is because they help prevent cell damage caused by “free radicals”. Medical website Healthline explains that while free radicals are essential for your health and perform important functions, including protecting your body from disease, you can have an excess of them.

In turn, this leads to “oxidative stress”, which damages healthy cells and has been linked to several serious chronic conditions like heart disease, dementia and cancer, as well as premature ageing and the risk of stroke. Antioxidants help keep free radical numbers in check and reduce oxidative stress.

Although you can find antioxidant in supplements, they’re also in plentiful supply in lots of the foods we eat, especially plants. Some foods have a reputation for being high in antioxidants — there’s a good chance you’ve heard about blueberries, for example. Blueberries are known to be loaded with nutrients and contain flavonoids, a type of antioxidant. But there are, in fact, several foods with more antioxidants than bluberries, as Health reports.

What are antioxidants?

As mentioned above, antioxidants are nutrients (you can also call them molecules) that fight free radicals in your body. Several vitamins, such as vitamins E and C, are antioxidants.

What are free radicals?

All our bodies are full of free radicals and, in fact, they are constantly being formed in our body. They serve important functions that are essential for our health — for example, as Healthline reports, your immune cells use free radicals to fight infections. But they can cause harm if there is an excessive level of them in your body. If there are more free radicals than antioxidants, it can lead to a condition called oxidative stress. This is linked to multiple illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It is often caused by things like alcohol, smoking, too much stress and an unhealthy diet.

What foods are high in antioxidants?

There are lots of foods that are high in antioxidants. We’ll pull out three, in particular, and then provide even more examples a bit further down.

Dark chocolate: it has antioxidants, particularly when it has a high cocoa content. It contains flavonoids, polyphenols, procyanidins, anthocyanins and theobromine — all types of antioxidants. Dark chocolate is also beneficial for your gut, where it promotes the growth of some of the gut’s “good” bacteria.

Nuts like walnuts and pecans: Walnuts are such a healthy food. If you combine them with one other food you can create ‘powerhouse’ protection against dementia. And they also have lots of antioxidants to help fight inflammation, thereby reducing the risk of long-term disease. Pecans have twice as much vitamin E, an antioxidant, as blueberries.

Fruits, especially Goji berries, apples and pomegranates:Goji berries contain beta-carotene, a powerful antioxidant. Given its anti-inflammatory properties, beta-carotene can help protect against heart disease, certain cancers and other health issues. Goji berries are also rich in vitamin C — more than five times the amount found in blueberries. They can also help cognitive function. Apples (including the skin) have flavonoids and vitamin C, and are rich in phloridzin, which has been shown to improve liver damage. Pomegrantes, similarly, are “an excellent source” of antioxidants, says Health.

But they’re not the only foods high in antioxidants. The USDA (The US government’s department of agriculture) listed the following foods as the best sources of antioxidants:

• kidney beans
• blueberries
• pinto beans
• cranberries
• artichokes
• blckberries
• prunes
• raspberries
• strawberries
• apples
• pecans
• cherries
• plums
• black beans
• dark leafy greens.