Fruit
Packed with flavor and nutrition - fruit is nature's treat
Fruit
Packed with flavor and nutrition - fruit is nature's treat
Fruit: The Perfect Snack, side dish or Dessert
Whole fruit - fresh. local, ripe and in season - it's so delicious it defines the seasons. August peaches, May strawberries, September apples. Frozen fruit is great too. Just skip the fruit juices and processed fake fruits. For more on sourcing, preparation and strategies just scroll below the list...
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Berries
Berries are the very best fruit - hands down. Blueberries, small and or wild are best. Fresh blackberries. Strawberries, small local organic. Frozen raspberries, or black if you can find them. Fresh boysenberries. Wow!
Low sugar, high nutrition, awesome flavors - Eat a lot more berries.
Frozen wild blueberries are great. Canned are good too. Pick your own in peak season and freeze them yourself. Cooked berries are good too - cobbler anyone?
How about using fresh cranberries to make a super nutritious relish year round! Lastly - if you can find Wild Treasure blackberries buy them - they are tops in nutrition.
Stone Fruit
Peaches, plums and nectarines - all nutritional and tasty. Go organic, so you can eat it all. Red flesh peaches are rare but the best.
Apricots
Super nutritious and available more and more as fresh fruit typically in summer. Great snacks.
Apples
Buy organic and eat the skin as peeling sacrifices half the nutrition and fiber. Ozark Gold is tops in nutrition. Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, Fuji are good too.
Kiwis
Low in sugar, sweet, high nutrition and flavor. Pretty too.
Citrus
Blood oranges are tops. Cara cara and navel oranges next. Valencia, mandarins too. Tangelos - better than many oranges. Be sure and eat the white membrane that divides up the fruit sections - very nutritious.
Limes and lemons
Yes.
Cherries
Tart "pie or sour" varieties have the best nutrition. Bing is also an excellent choice. Rainers are not in same ballpark. Organic.
Guava
Red fleshed are best, very tasty nutritious.
Mangoes
Frozen is the easy way to get these gems into dishes. 5 times the vitamin C of oranges.
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Bananas
Choose alternatives to the big yellow ones in the supermarket. They are high in sugar and low in nutrition.
Red bananas are better, let um turn dark and then eat. Sweeter and more nutritious.
Plantains
Like bananas but sliced and sautéed they range from sweet to potato-like depending on ripeness. Very good for your gut.
Papaya
High glycemic load, lots of sugar - go easy but a tasty accent though.
Pears
Less ripe is actually better, lowers the glycemic load. Buy organic in this case. Great on salads.
Grapes
Thompson seedless grapes (green and long) are nutritional weaklings. Try Red Flame seedless or heirloom varieties with big seeds and thick skins are preferred.
Modern large seedless hybrids have lots of chemicals applied to them so go organic.
Dried Fruit
Careful with the high glycemic load, use as flavor / accent vs a big snack. 1.5 Tbsp serving limit.
Dried plums (prunes) are very healthy. Choose golden raisins over regular. Zante or black currants have the best nutritional profile, lower sugar too.
Cranberries
Generally made palatable only by adding tons of sugar. Great accent to salads, sautéed greens or with meat.
Pineapple
Tropical, tasty but surprisingly low in nutrients.
Melons
Cantaloupe and all its melon friends. Lots of water, diluted nutrients. Smaller heirloom variety are best.
Skip Honeydew melons - they are nutritional lightweights and have too much sugar.
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Fruit Juice
Big surprise but true. The sugar rush from ANY fruit juice, even freshly squeezed, 100% organic, blessed by the Pope is NOT something humans are well adapted to consume.
Eat real whole fresh fruit, with the fiber, skin etc and you get better nutrition and avoid a sharp glycemic spike in your blood sugar.
Fake Fruit Juice
Worse still is "juice" that's heavily concentrated or loaded with added sugar. Just another reason to avoid all "fruit juices". Want the benefits of fruit? Eat some whole real fruit.
Fruit flavored anything
Fruit roll ups are not fruit. Neither are strawberry flavored breakfast cereals. Enough with the self delusion and the "oh but my kids like it." Your kid would like cocaine too. Man up and serve them real fruit.
Fruit
Tropical or Local, Fresh or Frozen - Take a Bite
Fruit
Tropical or Local, Fresh or Frozen - Take a Bite
Friendly Fruit
When it comes to fruit the key concepts are easy. Eat whole fruit, especially berries every day. Fresh, ripe and local mean all the best will be there for you. Organic means you can eat the skin where most nutrition is anyway.
Fiber. Nutrition. Hydration. Sweetness. Flavor. All wrapped up and ready to take along if you are on the go. A great dessert if you're home.
Farmers Market
Local farmers markets feature fruit that's fresh, local, at the peak of ripeness. That translates into better taste, better nutrition, better looking fruit.
Variety
Heirloom breeds are often available at a farmers market. They offer more than just a novel looking peach or apple. Unlike the few modern hybrid breeds we see in grocery stores that were chosen for shipping survival and sugar content heirlooms often offer superior flavor and nutrition. They also satisfy our human desire for novelty and variety which it turns out are very healthy instincts. From a health perspective its better to eat six kinds of apples vs just o
Clean and Green
Local small farmers also typically use very little if any chemicals. The reasons are many; they have small farms with lots of variety vs huge monocultures which pest prefer. For economics reasons small farmers don't want to spend money on chemicals and even then they try to get by with the bare minimum. And because they meet customers face to face, they are accountable, they get ask questions about chemicals every Saturday. Lastly, small family farmers eat out of the same garden that your produce comes from - they don't want chemicals either.
Organic vs Conventional
One question we face in the supermarket produce section is - organic or conventional? A good rule of thumb on fruit with a thin skin like grapes or fruit that's a challenge to wash like strawberries - buy organic. On the other hand, with fruits with a thick skin like bananas or melons you can save a buck and get conventional.
The challenge with super markets is that they are often forced by the economic and distribution constraints to source fruit from far away. Trucked in produce is often picked green to survive shipping and thus has lower nutrition. It can often be older and bruised. The breeds featured likely were chosen for durability and sugar content vs nutrition.
Still, if it's February and produce from halfway round the world is as good as it gets or blueberries are out of season but plentiful in the freezer case - dive in. Getting fruit onto your daily plate is the goal.
Grocery stores keep improving by leaps and bounds in an effort to keep up with consumer demand so be sure and let your grocer know what you are looking for in terms of quality and variety - this is one place where your vote counts so let your voice be heard.