This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Fruit, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
With Summer in the air and the warmer, longer evenings allowing us to make the most of being outdoors, it is time for the strawberry to make a return to our diets in other forms than just jam/preserves. Strawberries and cream, strawberries and sugar and as natural flavourings in ice cream, milkshakes, yoghurts and smoothies. Yes, my friends the summer is coming but is there any nutritional weight behind the sweet flavour of the strawberry? Or is it just a flavouring for you champagne lovers out there.
Nutrients are based on 100 grams
- Calories: 30.12 kcal
- Protein: 1.2 grams
- Carbohydrates: 7.23 grams
- Fibre: 2.29 grams
- Fat: 0.24 grams (Polyunsaturated Fats)
- Calcium: 14.46 milligrams
- Phosphorus: 19.28 milligrams
- Potassium: 166.26 milligrams
- Zinc: 0.12 milligrams
- Iron: 0.36 milligrams
- Magnesium: 9.64 milligrams
- Vitamin A: 2.41 micrograms
- Vitamin B1: 0.02 milligrams
- Vitamin B2: 0.07 milligrams
- Vitamin B3: 0.24 milligrams
- Vitamin B6: 0.06 milligrams
- Vitamin C: 56.63 milligrams
- Vitamin E: 0.14 micrograms
- Folate (folic acid): 18.07 micrograms
(A great tasting lightweight fruit - Beeble)
What do these figures mean?
In general the simple strawberry is relatively weak in nutritional benefits, that is until you look at the very larger percentage of vitamin C that it contains. In 100 grams of strawberries you get a huge 94% of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin C (goodbye colds and runny noses - Beeble).
Why eat Strawberries?
Apart from the great taste and their ability to add flavour to yoghurts and ice cream that is quite a large amount of vitamin C and vitamin C is great for building up the body’s immune system. Without it you could be saying “hello” to scurvy - the pirates’ enemy, resulting in liver spots, bleeding gums and in severe cases loss of teeth. Strawberries by themselves are a great low fat snack that are healthy for you.
But be Careful…
The more ice cream and sugar you add the more unhealthy the food becomes. That is not to say that the strawberry loses its vitamin C properties, but more the combination becomes more unhealthy the more you add ice cream and sugar. Of course you can look at it the other way and if you are going to eat the ice cream or sugar anyway then a great way to make it more healthy is to add strawberries. Either way you look at it: strawberries good, ice cream and sugar bad!
Summary
The strawberry is not the best fruit in the world but it does have a very high vitamin C content and it is a great low fat snack that you should consider adding to your diet this summer (sans sugar and ice cream, of course - Beeble)
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