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13 Exciting Reasons Why You Should Eat More of this One Red Fruit
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Pomegranate season is just about to get underway. Although these beautiful fruits can stain your clothing, lips, and fingers, they taste so good, no one cares! Some people find them difficult to peel and to extract their little red jewels of fruit, but this is why they sell pomegranate juice and even pomegranate wine!
This fruit is a favorite treat during the Jewish Rosh Hashanah holiday, as well as a fun to eat fruit that packs not only a sweet and sour type of taste, but it packs a wallop of health benefits as well. This fruit has been known for centuries for its medicinal powers.
Keep reading and find out why you need to be eating, or drinking, more of these beautiful little red fruits. You won’t believe all the goodness that Mother Nature packed into one tiny little piece of fruit!
1. A True Superfood
The little seeds inside pomegranates are called arils. They are loaded with healthy goodness and contain tons of nutrition including an impressive 7 grams of fiber, 30 percent of your daily RDA of vitamin C, 36 percent of vitamin K, 16 percent of folate, 3 grams of protein, 12 percent of the RDA of potassium, all in one little cup (about 174 grams). Although pomegranate seeds have a sour taste to them, they are actually very sweet, with that same cup having 24 grams of natural sugar and 144 calories.
2. Improves Exercise Performance
This fruit is rich in dietary nitrates, which has been shown in studies to improve exercise performance. In fact, in one small study, 19 athletes who ran on a treadmill consumed 1 gram of pomegranate extract about 30 minutes before exercise was shown to significantly improve blood flow, which lead to a delay in feelings of fatigue, as well as an increase in efficiency.
Although this study was small and more studies should be done, this study makes it appear that pomegranates can be super beneficial for physical performance, much in the same way that beet juice improves exercise performance.
3. Powerful Medicinal Properties
Pomegranates contain two compounds that have been shown to have medicinal power. The first is punicalagins, which are a special type of antioxidant that are found in both the juice and the peel of this fruit. This antioxidant is so powerful that it is actually 3 times more effective than either green tea or the resveratrol found in red wine and red grapes.
The other ingredient is called punicic acid, which comes from the pomegranate seed oil. This is the main fatty acid in the seeds. It has potent biological effects and is similar in makeup to conjugated linoleic acid. Pomegranate extracts and powdered supplements usually contain the seed oil, the juice, and the peel so that you can get all the benefits that this fruit has to offer, without being forced to eat the peel!
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