Jacksonville's Neighborhood Garden

The Doctor's Office

With cold and flu season in full swing, it's good to see kiwis and lemons in the produce bag this week. While a plant strong diet will help to keep your immune system strong and can be expected to reduce the number and severity of colds, vitamin C is an especially powerful phytonutrient against viruses.  The lemon is known for it's tartness which comes largely from it's rich vitamin C content (1 cup has 187% of the recommended daily allowance), but also is a good source of potassium, zinc, calcium, copper and magnesium.  Perhaps the most exciting phytonutrient in the lemon (all citrus actually) is hesperitan, which has been shown to improve blood flow.  One study proved hesperitan improves blood flow in the hands of women prone to cold fingers and another study showed that it reduced the rates of stroke. It acts by changing gene expression, affecting over 1,800 genes when given alone, but over 3,200 genes when ingested as orange juice!

Kiwi fruit are also known as Chinese gooseberries.  (If you're a diabetic, research the Indian gooseberry, or Amla).  Kiwi's have even more vitamin C per cup than lemons at 273%, and also have 89% of the RDA of vitamin K. The vitamin k will help all the calcium get to the bones (see the blog a few weeks ago on bone health for more info on that).  Kiwi fruits offer high levels of potassium, copper and manganese as well.  We have learned a lot about the benefits of kiwifruit from research funded by the kiwifruit industry.  Kiwis have been shown to prevent DNA damage with their anti-oxidant capacity as well as enhance DNA repair by modulating gene expression.  Kiwis have been shown to improve constipation in patients with irritable bowel syndrome and constipation, and have even been shown to improve insomnia!  That's right, eating 2 kiwi fruit one hour before bedtime improved time to sleep onset and increased the amount of sleep from an average of 6 hours to 7 hours in the study.

Not that we need all this information to enjoy these delicious fruits, but surely these strange facts can cause some really positive thoughts about your health as you enjoy this weeks produce!