Passion Fruit

This article is part of a larger article titled "100+ Healthiest Foods On Planet Earth."  Read it here.

The passion fruit is a species of passion flower native to South America. The fruit is not only juicy, sweet, and full of seeds, it is also incredibly versatile. Eaten on its own, juiced, or used to make passion fruit oil, the passion fruit is most commonly added to other fruit juices for flavour, but is also used in desserts, cocktails, and fruit salads. With a lot of nutritional benefit and a potent compound called piceatannol, the passion fruit is a healthy and unique fruit to work in to your diet.

Nutritionally, the passion fruit is a bit of a dark horse, when you consider how sweet-tasting the juice is (let’s face it, most things with simple sugars don’t do us much good). Although 100g of passion fruit will set you back around 97 calories, that’s more than made up for by the 50% of your Daily Value (DV) of vitamin C you get for that, in addition to 40% DV of dietary fibre, 25% DV of vitamin A, and 9% DV of potassium. All that nutrition will ensure a lot of benefit to your cardiovascular and digestive systems, with the vitamin A helping you to maintain your eyesight long into your life. With the delicious taste of passion fruit, what better way to take in your nutrients?

Passion fruit is also a source of many surprising health benefits, mainly due to a compound called piceatannol, also found in things like red wine and grapes. Piceatannol is significant because it appears to have a wide variety of positive effects on cardiovascular disease, including preventing high cholesterol, atherosclerosis and arrhythmia. It also seems to have an antioxidant effect.

In addition, a substance called scirpusin B has been found to have a strong vasorelaxant effect (which leads to increased blood flow and thus a healthier cardiovascular system). As it turns out, this compound is actually a dimer of piceatannol, meaning it is a compound consisting of two identical molecules linked together (in this case two molecules of piceatannol). With piceatannol having such a panoply of benefits for cardiovascular disease, and that being such a common killer in the West, the passion fruit may just be a good decision long-term.