Which foods are highest in vitamin C?
1 cup of Guavas, common, raw gives 376.7 mg of vitamin C. That is 419% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.
Share of the Daily Value (90 mg) in one portion.
| Food | Portion | Amount | % DV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guavas, common, raw | 1 cup (165 g) | 376.7 mg | 419% |
| Guava sauce, cooked | 1 cup (238 g) | 348.4 mg | 387% |
| Grapefruit juice, white, frozen concentrate, unsweetened | 1 can (6 fl oz) (207 g) | 248 mg | 276% |
| Apple juice, grape and pear blend, and calcium | 8 fl oz (250 g) | 126.8 mg | 141% |
| Lemons, raw, without peel | 1 cup, sections (212 g) | 112.4 mg | 125% |
| Acai berry drink, fortified fortified | 8 fl oz (266 g) | 112 mg | 124% |
| Oranges, raw, navels | 1.0 cup sections no membranes (165 g) | 97.5 mg | 108% |
| Lemon juice, raw | 1 cup (244 g) | 94.4 mg | 105% |
| Grapefruit juice, white, raw | 1 cup (247 g) | 93.9 mg | 104% |
| Broccoli, frozen, chopped | 1 cup (156 g) | 88 mg | 98% |
This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.
How to read this list
Any single item near the top of this table covers a day of vitamin C on its own, so the useful question is which of them you would actually eat again next week.
Two things are worth noticing. Juice concentrates and a fortified berry drink sit high in the ranking, and they get there honestly on the numbers, but a glass of sweetened juice is a different proposition from a guava or a bowl of broccoli. And the citrus entries are close to each other, so picking between an orange and a grapefruit on vitamin C grounds is not a real decision.
If you smoke or live with someone who smokes, your need runs higher than the label figure, which is the one situation on this page where the ranking is worth acting on rather than just reading.
One thing this table cannot show is what happens between the shop and the plate. Vitamin C dissolves in water and breaks down in heat, so long storage and long cooking quietly take a share of every number here. In broccoli, every domestic cooking method tested except steaming caused significant losses. Keep some of the day raw, steam rather than boil where you can, and if you do boil, keep the water for the soup.
The iron trick, measured
Vitamin C alongside a meal is the standard advice for getting more iron out of plant food, and it has now been tested rather than assumed.
Unsettled. Fifteen trials in 1,381 people added vitamin C rich fruit to meals. Ferritin rose by 9.4 micrograms per litre and haemoglobin by 1.34 grams per litre, both with moderate certainty. Iron absorption itself, measured directly, did not change, and body iron stores moved slightly the wrong way. The reviewers call the effect on absorption little to none. Fruit beside a plate of beans is still worth doing. It is a nudge rather than the lever it gets sold as.
One more reason to read this table as a shopping list instead of a supplement label. Across 69 long-term studies, each extra 100 milligrams of vitamin C a day from food went with about 11 per cent fewer deaths from any cause. The researchers who pooled those studies say the vitamin is standing in for fruit and vegetables rather than doing the work alone, which is an argument for the guava and not for the tablet.
None of that changes the size of the task. Five varied servings of fruit and vegetables a day can supply more than 200 mg, which is over twice what an adult needs.
A third of it arrives in a glass
In American survey data, drinks supply a third of all the vitamin C people take in. No other vitamin in that survey leans on beverages so heavily, which is why what happens to a carton between the factory and your fridge matters here more than it would elsewhere.
And juice does lose it. Orange juice made up from frozen concentrate held 117 mg per 8 fl oz when it was opened and 89 mg after a week in the fridge. Chilled juice barely moved, 69 to 64. The figure on the label is the figure it had on bottling day.
Cooked, raw and a tablet all arrive about the same
Cooking costs you vitamin C inside the food. What survives is absorbed as well as anything else, and it is worth keeping those two sentences apart. Sixty-eight men were repleted with vitamin C from a tablet, an orange, orange juice or cooked broccoli, and every source moved their blood level identically. Raw broccoli came out about a fifth lower, which the researchers call unlikely to matter in a mixed diet. So steam rather than boil to keep more of it in the food, and stop worrying about what the heat did to the rest.
What a package is allowed to claim
Established. There is no approved American health claim linking vitamin C to cancer. The claim that exists is about fruit and vegetables, and it says that a diet low in fat and high in them, foods that may contain vitamin A, vitamin C and dietary fibre, may reduce the risk of some cancers. To carry it a food has to be a good source of one of those three on its own. Fortification does not buy the label, so a drink that got its vitamin C from a factory cannot use that wording.
Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.
Full guide: Vitamin C: what it does, how much you need, and what it will not do
Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 90 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.