Pomegranates – A Super Food

September 9, 2011 Faux Runner Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday at Whole Foods, wanting to cleanse my body of the crap I’ve been eating recently – I picked up a pomegranate (among other fruits and vegetables). At $2.99 each, it was the most expensive item in my basket!

This fruit brought back memories of my dad peeling it for my mum while my mum was doing the dishes and cleaning up. Once she was done, we’d all eat it together (I suspect my dad would skip out though.. lol). Although sweet at the initial bite, I’d be put off by the rather hard tiny seeds. And Mum would always tell us about how awesome this one fruit was, how this would clean the blood stream and the liver, etc etc.

So, after eating half of this amazingly sweet fruit with zillions of little “seeds”, I looked up some of Pomegranate’s history and advantages. Here is some snippets of what I found from http://www.pomegranates.org/

“Pomegranates are a new super food: They are high in vitamin C and potassium, a great source of fiber, and low in calories. This fruit is not only delicious, but one of the healthier foods you can eat!

Pomegranate juice is high in three different types of polyphenols, a potent form of antioxidants. The three types – tannins, anthocyanins, and ellagic acid – are present in many fruits, but fresh pomegranate juice contains particularly high amounts of all three. The antioxidants are credited with helping in the prevention of cancer and heart disease.”

Wikipedia traces the use of Pomegranates in different cultures all over the world.

“In Hinduism, the pomegranate (Sanskrit: Beejpur, literally: replete with seeds) symbolizes prosperity and fertility, and is associated with both Bhoomidevi (the earth goddess) and Lord Ganesha (who is also called Bijapuraphalasakta, or the one fond of the many-seeded fruit).”

The irony – it is the festival of very same God(Ganesha) that caused me to eat crap and then look to Pomegranate for magically cleansing the crap out of my system. God works in mysterious ways!