The Skinny Kid

SaukValley.com - Serving Dixon, Sterling & Rock Falls

It’s a pretty good bet that if you ate three pomegranates a day, you’d lose weight and live longer.For one thing, given how finicky and labor-intensive it is to eat a pomegranate, you wouldn’t have much time left to eat other foods.

Then there’s the growing body of research suggesting that the polyphenolic antioxidants found in pomegranates (and in red grapes, blueberries, cranberries) have beneficial health effects that include improving cardiac health and reducing the risk of cancer.

I’ve talked about some of those benefits before, and frequently drink pomegranate juice myself. But the article points out that the juice may not offer the same benefits in terms of weight control.

Check the nutrition labels, and you’ll see why. These are sugar bombs of the first order.

An 8-ounce serving of Pom? Thirty-four grams of sugar. Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value: 40 grams. Frutzzo: 32 grams.

By comparison, an 8-ounce serving of Coca-Cola contains 27 grams of sugar; 8 ounces of Mountain Dew, 31 grams.

More sugar than soda? Wow. I guess all that sugar is in the fruit as well, but as the article points out it is a little harder to get at. Another one of those cases where slowing down the pace of eating can have benefits of its own.

ScienceDaily: Blueberries Contain Chemical That May Help Prevent Colon Cancer

A compound found in blueberries shows promise of preventing colon cancer in animals, according to a joint study by scientists at Rutgers University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The compound, pterostilbene, is a potent antioxidant that could be developed into a pill with the potential for fewer side effects than some commercial drugs that are currently used to prevent the disease. Colon cancer is considered the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States, the researchers say.

Who needs a pill? I love blueberries.