Do you know your goji berry from you blueberry or your pomegranates from your blackcurrants? Are your cupboards at home bursting with the hottest new fruits or the latest age-defying-fat-burning-will-make-look-like-Kylie tea?

But are these so called super fruits really that…super? Do you really need to splash the cash on expensive fruit to get a high dose of health beneficial vitamins? The current interest on super fruits has left many of us bemused, with no clear idea to what a super fruit is. To address this The Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) conducted research looking at the actual and potential health benefits of fruits.

According to the SCRI research, blackcurrants contain more Vitamin C, weight for weight than an orange and contain high concentrations of anthocyanins and antioxidants vitamins A and B to name but a few. Who knew the humble blackcurrant was a super fruit, in fact the research shows that blackcurrants are the number one fruit perhaps even overtaking and out performing the blueberry!

In line with the research the Blackcurrant Foundation has created a super fruit wheel that allows us to select the fruit we’re interested in and to see what health benefits it has compared to other fruits. So if you need an energy boost or want to know which fruits will help the fight against heart disease then speak to our experts and find out the fruits that are best for you.

Jo Hilditch from The Blackcurrant Foundation and Dr Derek Stewart from the Scottish Crop Research Institute join us live on Tuesday 19th June at 15.00 to dispel the myths of many super fruits

H: Host
D: Dr Derek Stewart
J: Jo Hilditch, the Blackcurrant Foundation

H: Hello and welcome to the Food and Drink Show brought to you by the Blackcurrant Foundation, I’m Jayne Constantinis. Now the term “superfood” or “super fruit” is always being banded around these days, isn’t it? We’re constantly being reminded of the need to introduce these superfoods or superfruits into our diet. But that term can actually be quite confusing. What does “super” mean? Why are they super? What do they actually do? Do we need to spend huge amounts of cash on them or is it just a passing fad? Well the Scottish Crop Research Institute decided to do some research into the health benefits of various fruits, and would you believe the humble blackcurrant came out on top? It is the most super of superfruits! And joining me in the studio today to talk about that research and also to answer any questions you may have about how to get your fair share of blackcurrants, is Dr Derek Stewart whose from the Scottish Crop Research Institute, and Jo Hilditch who chairs the Blackcurrant Foundation. And do remember this is an interactive show so we want your questions. Just type them in the box below the screen, send them to us with your name and we’ll get through as many as we can during the course of the show. Derek, Jo, thanks for coming in to talk to me. Derek, can I begin by asking you to just clarify or explain this word “super?” What does it really mean?

D: Well I think you hit the nail on the head – excuse me – when you showed it was very unclear what people think about, and having worked in this area of fruit and nutrition and the medical side for many years now, we – myself and the Blackcurrant Foundation decided we really need to put down some hard and fast definition. So basically what we’ve decided now, and it may not be the right one but it’s the first one, to be classed as a superfruit, we suggest that a fruit should have some credible medical benefits

H: Such as?

D: It would help inhibit cancer, it’ll help for things like Alzheimers, cardiovascular disease – any sort of condition basically, but some sort of basis on which you can say it’s beneficial to you

H: Is that what an anti-oxidant is? Because that term also has confused me

D: No, ok – you go back one step – the body, when you eat food it burns the food up and uses a lot of oxygen, but it’s not the most efficient machine, so it produces these dangerous chemicals called free radicals. And they escape – if they escape in the body and circle it round they can cause a lot of damage – cancers, cardio-vascular disease. What an anti-oxidant does is it sweeps these up and sort of wipes them up

H: Ok, great. But basically eating all fruit is good for you? There are some fruits which are better, so why did you decide to do this research, what prompted it?

D: Well as I say I worked in this area for a long time, and once we’d looked at the furore surrounding superfruits, the natural step was well, let’s have a look and see if any of them actually are superfruits. So I spent some time trawling through the scientific literature, looking at biomedical, clinical, standard medical and research papers, peer review research papers, that were focused on fruit and their impact upon different conditions. This took some time because you’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers, but once I got all these and I got the conclusions for them, what I did was cross-compared them for each type of fruit, so a lot of these – there were about 20 or 30 fruits. So once I’d done that, I had a consensus opinion of which one was the best, and it turned out to be blackcurrant

H: And you guessed that might be the case did you before you started the research or did it come as a surprise?

D: I knew it was going to be one of the sort of dark coloured fruits –

H: Because blueberry is the one that we have known about for a long time, isn’t it?

D: Yes. But certainly the research seems to have panned out, certainly the dark ones, the blueberries, blackcurrant and you go a bit lighter, or even blackberry. Raspberry and strawberry – all these ones tend to be at the top, and they seem to have shown to be beneficial on a range of conditions

H: Jo I bet it was a very pleasant surprise to you when you got the call from –

J: Yes we were thrilled to find blackcurrants right at the top, especially as this is an indigenous fruit. You know some of these others like blueberry, and these more exotic fruits like goji berries and acai and so on, they’re not indigenous and these are indigenous and they’re about to come into season now, so –

H: So they’re in season, am I right – end of June –

J: Beginning of July

H: Beginning of July –

J: Yes

H: So readily available and inexpensive because my perception of a lot of these other – blueberries in particular, superfruits is that they’re quite pricey

J: Yes I mean certainly if you can go down to the farm and pick your own they should be really next to nothing, but even in the supermarkets they’ll be very good value

H: I’m going to ask you to give us some very good recipes in a second but I first of all want you to show us this – because this is a very excellent idea, it’s the superfruit wheel. Talk us through what this is?

J: So I’ve got the superfruit health component side and this represents the percentage recommended daily allowances per 100gm of fruit. So if you’ve got a red in the box then that has little or no beneficial value, moderate for the orange, and then high level for the green. So you can just turn it round and look from fruit to fruit so you’ve got apple there, strawberry, raspberry looking pretty good, pomegranate – 100% of vitamin k and selenium, pear – bit of red there, peach, passion fruit and so on

H: And there are a few surprises aren’t there like banana has got not very much to recommend it, according to this. Stop eating them immediately!

J: No no no they’re still good for you, plenty of energy there. And then you get to blackcurrant and of course you’ve got a lot of green there

H: So that’s one side. What’s the other side Derek?

D: Well on the flip side what you’ve got is basically it’s translated the research I did into a sort of easy and more legible format, so you’ve got conditions up the side for example there’s heart disease, cancer, Alzeimers, neuro-degeneration -

H: I’m glad you said that not me!

D: Easy for me to say. Diabetes, things like that, so basically we were ranking what sort of impact each fruit had on these sort of conditional areas. So for example if you take a step back to banana – even banana doesn’t look so good there. Totally impacting on heart disease and diabetes but the research tended to show that blackcurrant actually turned out the best. As you can see it’s got greens all the way down, green obviously meaning a particularly good effect

J: And dark green which is the very high –

D: The very highest one of course, blackcurrant scores probably most on those. Of course blueberry scoring green right the way down as well, but not dark green

H: But it’s interesting this isn’t it, because I think it’s a symptom of the way people are taking charge of their own health. I mean I’m not just talking about enjoying the taste of fruit, but actually thinking about their health and their future and being able to look at something like this, you can pinpoint fruits that are going to be best for you as an individual. Where can people get this from?

J: If they go online onto superfruits.org we’ve got a page you can fill in, we’ll send you one free and then you can have it at home and then every time you buy some fruit you can just whiz round the wheel and see quite how good it is for you in any one of all the different areas

D: So you actually can compare apples and oranges!

H: Yes yes. That’s fantastic. Let’s take our first question, and it’s from Susan Murphy who says “I’m not a great fruit lover but I know I should eat more for my health” – don’t we all! “Which ones do you recommend I eat to maximise the good effects?” Well I can guess which one that’s going to be! Ok let’s think about how she can eat – get more blackcurrants, and particularly if she doesn’t particularly like eating fruit

J: Yes well if you don’t like them fresh, and they’re good fresh, if you have them fresh just with a bit of brown sugar and a bit of cream, really delicious and really good texture as well. But otherwise we’ve got a number of recipes on our own website, so those will include anything from ice creams, sorbets, some savoury dishes like we have a duck recipe on there with blackcurrants, really good. There’s a pavlova, and then of course there’s smoothies and drinks and of course you can drink blackcurrant all year round as well

H: Yes and are the juices as good, the kind of squash-type juices that you dilute with water – are they as good as eating them fresh?

D: They don’t have the full compliment of components in them as the fresh fruit, obviously, they’ve been slightly processed. But basically if you see the colour and you’re assuming it is a fruit juice, it’s not an artificial colour, you’re still getting the anti-oxidant benefit from that, perhaps in a diluted effect, but you’re still be getting it

H: Because as the mother of a 2 ½ year old, I’m always thinking about what I can offer her that she will enjoy but that I know is good for her, and it’s always a balancing act isn’t it? So a juice like that that she is going to enjoy –

J: Yes. So blackcurrant and apple smoothie would be really good. Bit of banana in it, you can make that yourself

H: Yes yes – oh lovely! Now Valerie has also sent us a question, she’s a keen gardener, I think Jo you’ll be interested in this one, and she’s got various fruit in her allotment – are blackcurrants easy to grow on a small scale and can you give us some tips please?

J: Yes definitely, very easy. I mean we put them in on a field scale, so we’d be putting in 4000 plants per acre, but it’s just as easy to get hold of a cutting, and we’ve got some nurserymen on our website from where you can get cuttings, put it in the ground during the winter and come April you’ll start seeing it shooting, leaves appearing, and in the second year you’ll get fruit. And you really have to do very little with them, just keep them well weeded and watered and so on –

H: Is it quite a hardy plant –

J: Yes

H: Or is it susceptible to a lot of diseases and pests and so on?

J: No, no, they’re hardy plants although there are some varieties obviously that are better than others. The Ben Hope variety is very good for disease and pest resistance, and that has a fantastic flavour as well, so if she can get hold of some of them, great

H: So the nurserymen have got some tips on – that’s the blackcurrantfoundation.co.uk website?

J: Yes and on the website there are tips on how to grow blackcurrants, as a domestic plant

H: How small a plot could you have to get a decent crop?

J: Oh the size of this table here –

H: Oh really?

J: Yes I mean you could get two or three bushes on there

D: And it’s almost certain the variety that people will pick up are ones that have been bred on the Scottish Crop Research Institute. Any one starting Ben – they’re derived from us

J: So they’re good for our climate, they’ve been developed for our climate

H: Fantastic

D: I think all the Ben varieties dominate across the UK now anyway

H: Great. Do keep your questions coming in just write it in the box below the screen and send it to us. Fiona has sent us a question, interesting one – will there be any nutritional differences if she buys organic blackcurrants?

D: I don’t think there’s anything out there on organic blackcurrants, but certainly some studies are coming out now onto lots of different crops like potato, barley, wheat, things like that, and given the variability from site to site, there’s no difference at all

J: I mean certainly grown conventionally, as they are in the UK we have to be extremely responsible and we want to minimise any sprays or etc that we use as well, so there’ll be no residue. That’s what we’re heading for

H: The organic debate is very interesting isn’t it and as you say there’s probably going to be more research coming out to tell us what – a bit like we were talking about super, the right from the wrong. Leonard from Brighton wants to know, I think we’ve already covered this but we’ll reiterate it – when are blackcurrants in season?

J: July and August for about 8 weeks. We’ve got 7 different varieties spread the season through two months, so the last ones will come from Scotland and they will probably be right at the end of August

H: And do all supermarkets stock them, are we going to find them easy to get hold of?

J: Some more than others it’s just the main multiples, they certainly should be stocking them when they’re in season

H: And if not we should ask them why not?

D: Indeed

J: Exactly. And make sure they’re British too

H: Absolutely. I do that, I go around looking for the little –

J: Look for the tractor

H: Union flag. Derek another question for you here, Serena Kappur wants to know “is it all a gimmick? Are superfruits really that super?”

D: Well I suggest they go to the site because everything we’ve done has been fully referenced, and if they want to actually go back and look at the scientific data themselves, all the references are on the website, so I’m not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes

H: I’ll just give the website again, it’s superfruits.org

D: So it’s definitely not a gimmick

H: And of course you’re looking at this from a purely scientific – I mean you’re a chemist, this is science, it’s not marketing

D: No. I’ve nothing to gain out of this

H: And you’ve come up with hard data to support these findings?

D: Yes

H: So there you are, have a look at the website. Fiona wants to know “with all the health benefits, would blackcurrants help her sports performance?” She plays netball

D: Well it won’t hinder it I think. Basically any consumption of fruit will basically add to your health and well-being, but certainly any sort of – I don’t know if netball is what you call a stress sport, but certainly blackcurrant –

H: Well there’s a lot of jumping isn’t there? I think

D: Well certainly blackcurrants have been shown to help something called visual acuity, so it would help her eyesight from ailing perhaps. It also helps relax the arteries so blood flow should go through much quicker, so perhaps –

H: That might get to the brain -

D: The suggestion would be yes it would

H: Yes, yes. And it can’t do any harm as you say –

D: Exactly –

H: So – now Natasha has asked a question that I’m also interested in because it’s specifically to women, whether these fruits have benefits to particular groups. She wants to know which fruits help heart disease, especially in women?

D: I don’t think there have been any studies looking at gender balancing in nutrition, certainly not with regard to fruit. But our studies show – and generally what they’ve been based on, all the clinical studies are mixed populations. So it’s beneficial, it’s not one or the other

H: Yes. And heart disease on the wheel here, we’ve got of course blackcurrants which you’d expect. Which other fruits scored high –

D: Raspberry, blueberry, strawberry – they all scored pretty well

H: But that is the highest again, yes. Now, Nieve has asked – how often does she need to have blackcurrants in her diet? Is this part of the 5 portions every day?

J: Yes certainly can be, I mean eat them every day while they’re in season and if they’re not in season put some in the freezer and you can toss some on your yogurt or your cereal every morning then. Or otherwise you can obviously drink it all year in juices and squashes and so on

H: What is a portion? I think there’s a lot of debate

D: Probably 100g – 80-100g – we’re talking about –

J: A handful

D: A cupped hand, yes

H: And of other fruits, it would be say – a portion would be one orange would it?

J: Yes. Or one lemon if you could eat it!

H: That’s right yes! Just picking up on that freezer point – Derek, tell us are fruits that we freeze and then take out again later – how much are they damaged by the freezing process?

D: It depends how long you’ve left them in there of course but generally when you’re freezing fruit, when you’re taking it out, as long as you’re not leaving it to thaw out and then eating it, way beyond that, if you’re eating them fairly close after thawing, the composition and nutritional benefit is going to be pretty close to what it was when you put it in there

H: Ok. James wants to know why are superfruits so expensive?

J: I wouldn’t say that all superfruits are expensive, or have to be. Certainly blackcurrants when they’re in season will be really good value. If you compare them to something like goji berries, which I believe are about 8 times more expensive than blackcurrants will be when they’re in season, then you know stick with home grown stuff –

H: I don’t even know what goji berries are –

J: No I don’t either

H: It’s one of those exotic things that’s a fad isn’t it?

J: Yes

H: Rachel wants to know, “are there any beauty benefits from eating blackcurrants?”

D: Well if it’s helping your arterial strength, your skin tone is going to be better

J: Although you might have rather dyed skin if you put a face pack on

D: Well yes –

H: You mean on the inside, not the outside?

D: Yes yes yes. I don’t think topical applications would be particularly good unless you want the purple look

H: Yes. Is that what fruit generally does for our skin?

D: I would suggest so, yes. It’s this anti-oxidants again - it’s – free radicals are the problem and they cause that ageing effect, the wrinkling up, so if you can take something in that would retard that – your skin tone and your looks should be better for longer

H: Is that what water does too? Is that why water benefits us?

D: I think water benefits you because basically it’s clearing things out of the system. Any toxins

H: Yes, ok. Can you just not obviously in huge detail, but I was interested in hearing about the duck recipe – and you’ve got lots of other recipes on the website haven’t you which I’m sure people –

J: The duck recipe is delicious. I mean I’ve done it with breast of duck, and you just marinate it overnight. I use a cassis, a British cassis –

H: Yes

J: My own one. Marinate it and then you just cook it until the juices turn into syrup and throw some blackcurrants over the top. It’s very simple. It’s on the website anyway so if anyone wants to try that

H: Yes and that’s again, it’s the blackcurrantfoundation.co.uk

J: Yes

H: Because duck with a fruit like that often works quite well because of the fattiness of the duck doesn’t it?

J: Delicious. Anything gamey, it goes well with venison as well

H: Lovely. A couple – time for a couple more questions. Jo wants to know “what is the best fruit one can eat on a daily basis?” I wonder what you’re going to say!

J: I think it’s blackcurrants

D: That’s probably a good idea!

H: Yes ok. And Vicky on our home grown theme – “are there any other British superfruits?” What comes second to blackcurrants?

D: Well the raspberries are up there fairly highly as well.

J: Yes

D: I’d probably recommend that

H: Where do they particularly win out?

D: They’re pretty good for – there’s a lot of studies now on cancer and things like that

H: We could have a look, couldn’t we? Ok raspberries come second. And just looking at the stuff that we’ve got laid out here, other kinds of lovely fruits – talk us through a couple more ideas of how we can use them imaginatively? You’ve mentioned ice cream

J: Yes, smoothies - I mean you can throw them in the whizzer with any other kind of fruit, make a delicious smoothie. Sorbets, pavlova, delicious with cream and other fruits

H: Lovely

J: I mean you mix them in a fruit salad they can bring a real tartness to a fruit salad and take away –

H: Maybe with raspberries as well, that would be – yes

J: And things like melon as well and so on

H: And they’re such a fantastic colour as well, to serve them at a dinner party or something

D: They’re very vibrant

J: And of course that’s where its strength is, in the deep colour

H: What is it about the deep colour that makes them so good?

D: It’s a class of compounds called anthocyanins, and they’re really potent anti-oxidants. So basically if you see the colour is there, that’s the one to go for

H: I wish I hadn’t asked that now because I won’t remember that. Give us your favourite, your one final favourite recipe – something we could all do tonight?

J: I think it would have to be the pavlova. Rather sugary and sweet and you know really delicious

H: So meringue –

J: Real spoiling – yes meringue, lots of cream and a pile of blackcurrants inside. And the meringue, the sweetness of the meringue compliments the tartness of the blackcurrants very well. We eat them fresh as well, lovely with a bit of sugar on

H: Lovely. Well thank you very much for sharing them with you. So anybody who wants any recipes they need to go to the Blackcurrant Foundation website, www.blackcurrantfoundation.co.uk but if you want more information generally about blackcurrants and other superfruits then go to www.superfruits.org. Thank you very much to Derek and Jo for joining me

D: Thank you

H: And for giving me such an interesting insight as to why blackcurrants are so super! Thanks for watching, hope you’ve enjoyed it, see you again soon – bye

Still got a question or comment?

Name

Your question Question

Enter code