There are many inadquacies in the inspection of health foods in China. The efficiency of conventional evaluation methods is too low. The study on safety evaluation technique and standard of ingredients from health foods was aimed at establishing a rapid method for estimating the safety of functional foods. This article only dissertated in one aspect, that is, cytotoxicity. In this article, notoginseng and rhizome of Sichuan lovage were taken for exmple. Three methods were used, that is, MTT, NRU and clony formation assay. For notoginseng, CHO and V 79 cell lines were selected. For rhizome of Sichuan lovage, the cell lines were CHL, BalB/C and SL-7 cell lines. The results showed that NRU method on CHO and CHL cell lines was more sensitive and reliable.