IT AIN'T EASY BEIN' GREENS. Sure, they provide color, crunch, and nutrients in a sandwich, but it's the sliced turkey or chicken salad that gets top billing. And most green salads are mere preludes to the "real" meal. It's the fruits of the plant we're trained to appreciate most, not the leaves that help them grow.

Yet these produce-section also-rans are the true stars when it comes to your health. "Apart from the traditional micronutrients--B vitamins, vitamin C, minerals such as calcium--there are wonderful phytochemicals in greens," says Dave Grotto, R.D., director of nutrition education at the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Care in Evanston, Ill. These substances protect your eyes, improve your skin, lower your cholesterol, and help stave off cancer.

The growing awareness of healthful greens is paralleled by their increasing availability. "People used to think of spinach when they thought of eating greens, but now they're being a little more adventurous," says Cheryl Forberg, R.D., author of Stop the Clock! Cooking. "They're trying kale, collard, Swiss chard--greens they might not have tried before. Now it's easy to find almost any type of green in the store."

And these greens aren't just for tossing into the salad bowl. They can be steamed, sauteed, stir-fried, boiled, broiled, or baked, usually without jeopardizing their nutrient profiles. "You may lose some water-soluble vitamins in the cooking process, but that's insignificant compared to the amount of nutrients you're taking in," Forberg says. Because greens are so water-rich, cooking them concentrates the amount you end up eating. For example, most raw greens shrink by half when cooked; with those that are particularly high in water content, like baby spinach, the difference can be as much as 75 percent.

All greens--raw or cooked--are good for you, but which ones, leaf for leaf, offer the most nutritional bang? To find out, we sorted them by their most common nutrients (vitamin C, folate, and beta carotene), factored in fiber, and searched out additional "bonus" benefits. Here are our top picks, along with delectable recipes that showcase flavor, color, and texture.