Experts recommend eating banana as a healthy alternative to candy and salty snacks.
Bananas are known for their high potassium content. Time shared that a medium fruit has 422 mg potassium which is 12 percent of the daily total recommended by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
"Most Americans do not get enough dietary potassium," Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, distinguished university professor emerita at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York who researches such things, said. "Those who consume more potassium have a lower risk of stroke."
Moreover, a medium banana has 102 calories, 3 grams of fiber and 17% recommended daily vitamin C. Too, it contains 27 grams of carbohydrates and 14 grams of sugar.
"Many of my patients are fearful of this fruit due to its high carbohydrate content," Kristin Kirkpatrick, registered dietitian and manager of Wellness Nutrition Services at Cleveland Clinic's Wellness Institute, said. She advised to slice a banana in half and couple it with a fat, like almond or peanut butter, to minimize its effects on blood sugar and insulin.
Professor David Nieman found out that banana can refuel your body as effectively as Gatorade far less money and food dye. David, who is a professor of health science and director of the Appalachian State University Human Performance Laboratory at the North Carolina Research Campus, published a study in PLOS One wherein he tested bananas against Gatorade in athletes.
After conducting the study, he discovered how amazing bananas are. "The banana, we think, is like this wonderful athletic package where you get the sugars you need, you get the vitamins and electrolytes that the body likes during exercise, and this very unique molecule dopamine that can help with the oxidative stress, all at one third the cost of Gatorade," he said.
Aside from that, Professor James Dale from Australia's Queensland University of Technology said that bananas are one of the most versatile world food and some of the toughest producing fruit continuously under good conditions and resilient for long periods when rains do not come. In fact, he is a part of a team who genetically engineered a banana to deliver alpha - and beta-carotene which turns vitamin A in the body.
However, Dan Koeppel highlighted one problem about bananas which is worth considering. "The monoculture turns forests into factories, and means that bananas are very susceptible to disease, requiring lots of damaging pesticides to sustain the crop," the author of "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World" said. "At the same time, bananas are the cheapest fruit in the supermarket. Maintaining these prices often means paying workers very little, which has led to violent suppression of attempts to expand worker benefits."
Despite this, he still recommends eating them as a healthy alternative to junk foods. He recommended customers should demand more varieties to break the monoculture.
