Apricots Health Benefits

If you're having trouble getting those ou love to eat more vegetables, perhaps you need to try a new tactic. Why not offer foods that have the nutrition of vegetables but the sweet taste of fruit? Our favorite of these is the apricot.

Like vegetables that are yellow to orange in color, apricots ar a storehouse of carotene— the plant form of vitamin A. Carotene has taken the nutrition world by storm since being linked to cancer prevention several years ago. In their landmark study, Richard Shekelle, M.D., and his co-workers at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago compared lung cancer rates among those on both high- and low-carotene diets. Of 500 men in the high-carotene group, only 2 developed lung cancer, but among 500 men with low intakes, 14 died.

According to Peter Greenwald, M.D., director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of cancer prevention and Control, other studies also show a protective effect from carotene, not only against cancer of the lung but also cancer of the stomach, bladder, esophagus, and throat. As a result, the NCI is now sponsoring more than a dozen studies to confirm carotene's role as a protective nutrient.

You can meet your carotene quota with apricots alone. Three raw fruits or ten dried apricots halves will give you half the recommended allowance. And whether canned, fresh or dried, apricots have little or no fat, sodium, or cholesterol, which is a plus for your heart. Dried apricots offer another bonus for a healthy heart—plenty of potassium. Infact, and easy-to-eat handful of ten dried apricots provides as much potassium as a medium-sized orange or a banana.

Potassium isn't dried apricot's only mineral. The same serving of 10 halves has 20% of the recommended iron allowance for men and postmenopausal women and is a moderae source of copper with about 10% of the recommended allowance. Of course, the higher concentration of minerals in dried apricots has its price—more calories than apricots that are raw or canned in juice.