Little-Known Fruits with Large Health Benefits

The old adage goes, “What you don’t know, won’t hurt you.” Well, that doesn’t necessarily hold true at all times. In an ironically paradoxical way another saying states that, “Ignorance is a voluntary misfortune.” Well, believe what you may want to, but I think I’m stacking my odds and putting my money on knowing. Especially because as a kid in the 80s, GI Joe always emphasized that, “Knowing is half the battle.”

Where am I going with all this? Well, I wanted to write about some fruits that may not be very familiar to you. These fruits have been identified as “super fruits” and not because they shoot heat vision out of their pits but because of the health benefits that they bring to our bodies.

As a health enthusiast, I’m sure you are aware that an active lifestyle and a balanced diet are imperative to keeping our bodies in better shape to deal with the normal wear and tear that the inevitable aging effects of our cells undergo. In order to help boost that second component of living a healthy lifestyle there are certain super foods that contain natural ingredients that deliver the needed chemicals, vitamins, minerals or nutrients that do us plenty of good. Among these super foods are fruits that serve this same purpose. Fruits are extraordinary food items that mankind has depended on since we appeared on Earth. Early medicine made use of several of these fruits based on experimentation and experience but with today’s advancements in food science we are capable of decoding these super fruits’ secrets.

Here is a list of those unfamiliar super fruits from lands across the world. These fruits are great dietary supplements and are not supposed to replace prescribed medication if you already have been diagnosed with some of the conditions they address. But they do help and they do so in a natural way.

Mangosteen

Mangosteen has been dubbed in South East Asia as the “Queen of Fruits”. Particularly because when you slice it open the fruits are arranged in a way that resemble a queen’s crown. The fruit is extremely delicious and you can easily finish several of them in one sitting. The taste is a mix of citrusy, tangy and sweet all at once and they are very easy to open and enjoy.

Mangosteen has traditionally been used as a cure for diarrhea and it has various anti-inflammatory properties due to the presence of xanthones. These properties make it a great natural pain reliever meaning you can’t overdose on them. Mangosteen also contains phytochemicals and while its cancer-preventing properties are still being studied it is known to reduce blood sugar levels making this is a great dessert for people suffering from Type 2 Diabetes. The fruit can be hard to come by in the US but some companies extract the essential nutrients in a powdered form that they sell at health stores.

Soursop

The Soursop fruit also known in Spanish as Guanabana is a deliciously healthy treat. The fruit, which looks like a puffer fish because of some dull spikes on the outside can be found in most South American countries and throughout tropical countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In the 70s, the National Cancer Institute evaluated the cancer-prevention properties of this fruit and that study yielded extremely optimistic results.

This fruit showed more promise in battling colon cancer cells due to a chemical called annonaceous acetogenins, which I’m sure uses its tongue twisting name to get the job done. This chemical also suppresses oncogenes, which are cancer-causing genes in our bodies, thereby helping prevent cancer especially in people whose families have known to have the disease running in their bloodline. The fruit can be turned into a delicious tea and the juice from it is extremely refreshing.

Acerola

Acerola is found in Central American countries like Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala. It is called the Barbados cherry. Although it doesn’t belong to that genealogy its appearance makes it look like a cherry. So I won’t be surprised if a Central American founding father also cut down an Acerola tree and admitted it. This fruit is a super fruit and is packed with enormous amounts of Vitamin C. This makes the fruit extremely acidic in taste and because of this it is usually ingested as a jam or it is extracted and turned into medicine. Acerola is said to remedy allergic rhinitis, retinal hemorrhages and depression. Blood sugar levels have also shown very favorable responsiveness to the contents of this fruit. The fruit is also turned into a topical gel that promotes skin health and combats aging. Maybe this was the Fountain of Youth that the Spanish were looking for.

These are just some of the many fruits in the world we don’t know about. It’s always nice to know more about fruits other than the usual oranges, apples, bananas and kiwis we usually partake of. We’ll cover more of these little-known superfruits in a later article to help keep you living that healthy lifestyle.