Useful knowledge about fruit

Fruit is not only delicious, it's essential for maintaining good health. Here's some guidelines on how to choose and store your fruit so you can fully reap its benefits.

Unless you're buying locally grown fruit, you rarely get it fully ripe from the supermarket. If it was picked at its peak, it would spoil during the time it takes to move the fruit from the grower to you. You may have heard that putting fruit in a paper bag concentrates the ethylene gas and speeds ripening.

To make it ripen even faster, put some fully ripe fruit (bananas, for example) into the bag with it. The ripe fruit is giving off more ethylene, which the unripe fruit can use.Don't use plastic bags; the fruit will just spoil. The paper bag trick only works with fruits that will continue to ripen after they've been picked. Among them are apples, avocados, bananas, blueberries, cantaloupe, kiwis, mangoes, peaches, pears, plums and tomatoes.

It pays to know which fruits don't ripen after picking, so you can avoid buying unripe ones in the first place. They include citrus fruits, pineapples, cherries, grapes, raspberries, strawberries and honeydew melons.

The fruit juice industry has done a great job of persuading people that juice is a wonderful food, and the earlier you get your kids started on it, the better. Well, there's some truth in that. Fresh orange juice, with plenty of pulp, has vitamins, fibre, some minerals, just about no fat and it tastes good. But there's little need to chug down OJ like it's water — a mere 125 millilitres (half a cup) would supply about 60 milligrams vitamin C, well above the recommendations of 40 millilgrams per day for men and 30 milligrams for women.

What you don't hear so much about is all the calories in juice. A serving of250 millilitres (one cup) of orange juice has 112 calories, a bit more than the 106 in the same amount of Coke. (Of course the diet version has no calories, but it does have artificial sweeteners — another story altogether.) These days, some young children nurse bottles of juice more or less all day.

So the first problem is that juice drinkers usually drink way too much of it. Go for whole fruit instead. It's not as easy to chow down on a couple of oranges as it is to drink a few glasses of juice.

A second problem is that the food companies have created tons of juice-like products, such as "juice drink," that are mostly sugar and water, with varying amounts of juice thrown in. Because these cost less, many people choose them over 100 percent juice.

Do you really need Key limes for Key lime pie or Key lime bars? Key lime growers want you to think you do, but tasters in a blind taste test split over which was better, the bars made with Key limes or those made with regular lime juice.Key limes are a trifle sweeter than the others, but the difference isn't great — except in the amount of work it takes to get at that juice. It takes about six Keys to get the same amount of juice you can get from one regular lime.

Easiest of all is bottled lime juice, but testers found it bitter and an unacceptable substitute for any kind of lime, Key or otherwise.