The healthiest seasonal fruit

Whatever their eating habits for the rest of the year, Christmas seems to bring out the desire to load our sideboards with groaning bowls of fruit. Usually satsumas and clementines are favourites, and they certainly are healthy, but there is another winter fruit that I associate with this dark time of year and that is the pomegranate. As a child I was diverted for hours by being given my mother’s old hatpin and a pomegranate. It was ceremoniously cut in half and then I focused on winkling out the seeds and pulling ugly faces if by any mischance I got some of the bitter yellow pith.

Pomegranates have become the fashionable fruit over the past year and now you can find its juice in every chiller cabinet so I thought a reminder of its benefits might encourage you to add them to your shopping trolley. As this is a spiritual time of year, you might like to know that ancient scholars believed that: the number of seeds (roughly 613) found in a single fruit corresponded to the 613 commands of the Hebrew Torah. Now, that could keep the kids quiet as they counted every one before they ate it!

Health wise, the pomegranate contains at least a dozen known anti-inflammatory phytochemicals and around 36 antioxidants. Studies have suggested that both the fruit and its juice are beneficial to help treat or prevent heart disease, high cholesterol, prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s. However, if you don’t like the taste then stock up on other fruits such as cherries, blueberries, and raspberries, as they also give you similar health benefits.