Introducing Pomegranates
One of my teenage memories is of my father bringing home
pomegranates to eat when they were in season.
He would slice them in half and then show me how to pick out the
pulp-covered seeds one by one with a small teaspoon. It was a time consuming
process eating each seed individually, great care had to be taken digging into
the fruit with the spoon and inevitably you ended up covered in sticky juice. Since then pomegranates have become much more
popular; not only to eat as a fruit, but also to drink as juice, and taken as supplements
and teas to promote good health. They have been cultivated since ancient times
and are a species native to Iran and the Himalayas. They have been grown in the
Caucasus since antiquity and can now be found being cultivated all around the
world from South East Asia to California.
The fruit’s Latin name is Punica granatum, and the word
pomegranate is derived from the Latin pomum
or apple and granatus which means
seeded. It is a deciduous shrub that has
a small, bright red flower and bears a roundish fruit that is around the size
of a small grapefruit. The fruit is
covered in a thick skin that is reddish in colour and contains around six
hundred seeds that are encased in a juicy pulp.
These seeds and the surrounding pulp are called arils, and the arils can
range in colour from white to a dark red. They are a long living, hardy shrub,
and there are some trees in Europe that are over two hundred years old,
although the vigour and productivity of the trees tends to start declining
after fifteen years or so.
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| Pomegranate |
Pomegranates in History
They have been cultivated and eaten in Europe and the Middle
East since ancient times and one of the earliest literary references to
pomegranates was in Homer’s Hymns. In
ancient mythology they were regarded as symbols of birth, death and then eternal
life because of the multitude of seeds that they contained. They were also linked in mythology to
forbidden desire, because of the deep red colour of the outer skin that
resembled the colour of blood. In the
South Caucasus, the decayed remains of pomegranates have been excavated that
date back at least a thousand years. A dried out fruit was found preserved in
the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut’s butler, and they were mentioned on Mesopotamian
cuneiform tablets. Pomegranates were grown
and eaten in Southeast Asia and China in early times and may have been
introduced by traders on the Silk Road or by early sea merchants. The city of Granada in Spain is named after
the pomegranate, and in early English they were called ‘apple of Grenada’. They were introduced into the New World by
the Spanish Conquistadors, and their cultivation spread rapidly through the
Caribbean and Latin America. They started to be cultivated in Britain in the
seventeenth century, but did not fruit well, and were then introduced into
North America by the early colonists.
If you want to eat pomegranate as a fruit, you need to score
the tough skin with a knife and then break open the fruit. You can then separate
the arils from the skin and the outer pulp relatively easily. This task is made even easier by placing the fruit
in a bowl of water, as the arils will sink to the bottom of the bowl and the
skin and pulp will stay floating on the surface. The whole of the aril is
eaten, both seed and pulp, but the taste and juice is derived almost entirely
from the reddish, semi-translucent pulp.
In cooking, the arils are made into sauces, which are widely used in
dishes in Iran and the Middle East, as they have a flavour that is both sweet
and sour. In India and Pakistan, wild pomegranate seeds are made into a spice
called anardana, which is popularly used when making curries and chutneys.
Health Benefits of Pomegranates
So what are the potential benefits of including pomegranates
in your diet? Pomegranate juice is very high in vitamin C, and a 100ml serving
contains around 16% of an adult’s daily vitamin C requirement. They are also a good source of vitamin B5 or
pantothenic acid, vitamin E, iron, antioxidant polyphenols, tannins,
anthocyanins and potassium. A study
undertaken by scientists in Israel, suggests that drinking pomegranate juice
can reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and that it has been
shown to contain higher levels of antioxidants than any of the other fruit
juices, green tea or red wine.
Antioxidants are an important part of your diet because they protect
your body from the free radicals in your bloodstream. Free radicals act on cholesterol during a process
known as oxidation, which is thought to contribute to the hardening of the
arteries. The Israeli study showed that
drinking pomegranate juice halved the speed of the cholesterol oxidation and
reduced the amount of LDL retained in the body, LDL being the type of
cholesterol that forms the fatty deposits in human arteries that can then lead
to heart disease.
Drinking pomegranate juice may also be very good news for
men, especially men who have undergone treatment for prostate cancer. A
long-term medical study showed that men who were given the juice to drink daily
after their prostate cancer treatment, but were showing signs of the cancer
returning, had lower levels of PSA than the men who had pulled out of the study
and were no longer drinking it. PSA or ‘prostate specific antigen’ is an enzyme
that acts on breaking down proteins in seminal fluid and PSA levels are often
high in those who suffer from prostate cancer, so the effect of the pomegranate
juice lowering PSA levels is a very beneficial one. Some of the men on the study continued to
show lower levels of PSA after more than three years, even though they had not
received any further prostate cancer treatment other than drinking the juice.
They are also now widely used in diets and as a weight loss
supplement. They are regarded as a
superfood because of the high level of antioxidants that they contain, and diet
pills and supplements that contain pomegranate extract are becoming very
popular. However, this is probably more
due to their high nutritional value, rather than any properties that
pomegranate has to aid in weight loss, as studies so far have not indicated
that they can help or speed up weight loss in any way. The use of pomegranate supplements and
drinking the juice is also very popular in programmes designed to detox your
body, again because of the presence of all those wonderful antioxidants and
vitamins.
How to Get the Benefits of Pomegranate into Your Diet
If you find that eating pomegranate as a fruit or using them
in your cooking is too much of a hassle and too time consuming, then there are
other ways of ensuring your daily intake of this healthy fruit. You can now get juice, supplements, teas,
molasses and sauces, all of which will help you get those all-important
vitamins and antioxidants into your body.
You can find all of these products in your local health food stores and also
very easily online.
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| Pomegranate Tree With Fruit |
Drinking pomegranate juice has been popular in Persia and
India since ancient times, and recently has also become very popular in the
United States and the UK, both for its taste and its perceived health
benefits. It has also become the trendy
juice to mix with champagne when creating champagne cocktails. Grenadine has
long been a staple ingredient of cocktails and is made of thickened and
sweetened pomegranate juice. Grenadine
is also used in several Iranian recipes, such as fesenjan which is a thick
sauce made from ground walnuts and pomegranate juice that is poured over
poultry and rice.
So, if you have never tried pomegranates before, why not
reap the health benefits and give this colourful fruit a try?
Pomegranate image SriniG Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Pomegranate Tree With Fruit Image Amnon S Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 Generic
