(Now for a break in the clouds of NeoNian doom and gloom. One or more of you [who?] have brought ScienceAlert to our attention and now it's a "must" site with me. There's actually a lot of great news there -- much of it in conditional mood -- amid its own doom and gloom features. Thanks! NN) We've been eating bananas wrong this whole time.
That's right, you can eat banana peels. And not only are they edible, they're also good for you. If you live in the US, you're probably used to tossing banana peels in the trash. But people in other countries, including India, have been taking advantage of their nutritional benefits for decades.
While a banana's flesh is soft and sweet, the skin is thick, fibrous, and slightly bitter. To eat the peel, you can either blend it into smoothies or fry, bake, or boil them for at least 10 minutes. Heat breaks down the skin's fibre and loosens up that tough texture, making the peel easier to chew and digest. Also, the riper you allow the banana to get, the thinner and sweeter the peel becomes. That's because of a natural plant hormone called ethylene that fruits release as they ripen.
Ethylene interacts with the sugars and fibre in the banana skin, changing complex sugars into simple sugars and breaking down pectin, a form of fibre in bananas that keeps them stiff. That's why the older your banana is, the flimsier it feels. At the same time, other hormones break down the green pigments in the peel, turning them yellow and eventually brown.
The sweet flesh of a medium-sized banana contains significant percentages of your daily recommended intake of various nutrients, such as:.......
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