The red carotenoid of tomatoes and watermelon. Absorption improves with cooking and fat.
Every figure here is per 100 g of the food, not per serving. That makes foods comparable to each other, but it is not how anyone eats: 100 g of a dried spice and 100 g of a leafy green are very different portions, so a high position in this list does not tell you what a meal contributes.
Nutrient values are per 100 g of the USDA reference entry named on this page and vary with variety, growing conditions, storage and preparation.
No FDA Daily Value is established for lycopene, so no % DV is shown.
24 entries with a measured lycopene value, highest first.
Citrullus lanatus
A large cucurbit fruit that is over nine-tenths water by weight, with red flesh coloured by lycopene. The rind and the flesh both…
Solanum lycopersicum
The fruit of a nightshade plant, used culinarily as a vegetable. Its red colour comes from lycopene, which becomes considerably…
Carica papaya
A soft tropical fruit with orange or red flesh and black seeds, eaten ripe as fruit and green as a vegetable. Its latex contains…
Citrus x paradisi
A large, bitter-sweet citrus fruit, a hybrid of pomelo and sweet orange. Pink and red varieties owe their colour to lycopene,…
Gallus gallus domesticus
A small, soft organ meat with a milder flavour and finer texture than beef liver, which is why it dominates pâtés and parfaits.…
Piper nigrum
The dried unripe fruit of the Piper nigrum vine, used whole or ground. The USDA entry is per 100 g of ground pepper, whereas a…
Cinnamomum cassia / Cinnamomum verum
Dried inner bark from several Cinnamomum species. Almost all supermarket cinnamon is cassia, which contains far more coumarin…
Mangifera indica
A tropical stone fruit in the cashew family, with hundreds of cultivars differing sharply in fibre, sweetness and aroma. Eaten…
Daucus carota subsp. sativus
The taproot of a cultivated umbellifer, orange in most modern varieties because of selective breeding for carotene. Purple,…
Bos taurus
The metabolic and storage organ of cattle, and consequently one of the most nutrient-concentrated foods in the human diet by a…
Penaeus spp.
Decapod crustaceans, the most traded seafood in the world by value and now largely farmed. Their shells contain astaxanthin bound…
Engraulis encrasicolus
Tiny oily fish usually sold salt-cured and packed in oil, where months of curing dissolves the flesh into an intensely savoury…
Crassostrea virginica
Filter-feeding bivalve molluscs, farmed and wild-harvested, whose flavour tracks the water they grew in closely enough that…
Mytilus edulis
Rope- or bottom-grown bivalves that need no feed input, making them one of the lowest-impact animal foods produced. They open…
Cervidae spp.
Meat from deer, whether wild-harvested or farmed. Because the animals are active and rarely grain-finished, the carcass carries…
Gallus gallus domesticus
Dark leg meat, richer in myoglobin, fat and connective tissue than breast because these are the muscles the bird actually uses.…
Sardina pilchardus
Small schooling fish canned whole with their soft, edible bones intact. Being short-lived plankton feeders low in the food chain,…
A hard cheese aged a year or more, during which enzymes break down protein into free amino acids and the crystalline tyrosine…
A fresh, unripened cheese made by acidifying milk and draining the curd without pressing, leaving the loose grains in a little…
Salmo salar
The great majority of salmon sold worldwide, raised in sea pens on formulated feed. It is consistently fattier than wild salmon,…
Bos taurus
Cow milk with its fat left in, standardised to around 3.25% in most markets and almost always pasteurised. It is an emulsion in…
Cream churned until the fat globules coalesce and separate from the buttermilk, leaving a product that is overwhelmingly fat.…
Milk fermented with Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, which acidify it until the casein…
Sus scrofa domesticus
A small muscle running along the inside of the spine that does almost no work, making it the leanest and most tender cut on the…