Pomegranates - The miracle fruit?
Pomegranates are the latest craze in health food, making their way into both health drinks and topical products. They’ve been credited with helping everything from heart disease and arthritis to skin cancer and acne. Obviously, the impact of some of these benefits can get a bit overblown, but there’s no denying that pomegranates are a healthy addition to most any diet.
Pomegranates are a fairly unique fruit native to the Middle East. They have a husky skin that peels away to reveal hundreds of clustered, grape-like beads of fruit, each surrounding a seed. In all honesty, pomegranates can be somewhat of a pain to eat, so its nice to see them more readily available these days in juice form, etc. A single pomegranate contains over 40% of your recommended daily value of vitamin C. They are also rich in vitamins A and E, as well as folic acid. It’s said that eating one pomegranate provides three times the antioxidants found in a glass of green tea.
Now granted, if you were to eat a pomegranate’s worth of raspberries, blackberries or blueberries, the antioxidant content might very well be just as high (if not higher), so statistics like these can seem a bit sensational. However, the fact remains that pomegranates are one of the healthiest fruits out there. Besides their vitamin content, pomegranates are also rich in the mineral iron. Iron is used in the production of hemoglobin, which further promotes smooth and supple skin, and can enhance your skin tone.
While pomegranates are a great addition to your diet, it’s really not a good idea to try applying pomegranate juice directly to your skin, especially in the case of acne blemishes that may effectively be open wounds. It’s pretty much always a bad idea to apply any acidic fruit directly to an open wound. It won’t help your acne heal faster, but instead may just end up irritating your skin in the end.
