Health Benefits: Pineapples

[mysteriouza]

In Hawaii, they eat chunks of juicy pineapples as a delicious cure for digestive problems.
We know now that the fresh fruit contains an enzyme, bromelin, which can digest many times its own weight of protein in a few minutes.
Like the enzyme papain in the unripe papaya fruit, bromelain breaks down only food and dead tissue, leaving our guts miraculously unassailed.
The juice of fresh pineapples is also effective folk medicine for sore throats, an instant gargle and was once a favorite herbal remedy for diphtheria.
This reputation suggests that the pineapple contains compounds with marked antibiotic and anti-inflammatory effect.


Some of these compounds, though not the enzyme bromelain, probably survive the processing that produces the juice or the canned fruit.
But for maximum healing potential, the fresh ripe fruit, incidentally, loses that acrid tartness which puts many people off pineapples.


When choosing your pineapple, avoid the diseased looking specimens with rotting leaves on offer in some markets and choose fresh, ripe unbruised fruit.
The ripeness test is whether you can tug a leaf easily out of its own.