Diabetic Cookbook

By Adam Garcia

A Dragonfruit A Day Helps Keep Your Endocrinologist Away!

Have you ever heard of a Pitaya Fruit? Neither did I, until a couple of days ago. It is commonly known as Dragonfruit and comes off of a cactus tree (See Below). It is also called Pitahaya Fruit and Strawberry Pear. According to the information I read on Foodlywise.com, it is one of the most wonderful and highly nutritious fruits on the market today. In fact, it even has a nutritional benefit which helps to lower blood glucose levels in Type 2 diabetics. Dragonfruit is a great fruit to incorporate into a diabetic meal plan and lots of diabetic recipes can include dragonfruit. While dragonfruit is not a Type 2 diabetes cure, it offers diabetics a substantial health benefit towards lower blood glucose levels.

It is packed with Vitamin C, fiber, and other micro nutrients. In fact, dragonfruit has almost 1g of fiber per 100g of the fresh fruit. Expect to see 10g or more of dietary fiber per 100g of the dried pitahaya fruit. Along with fiber, Dragonfruit has almost 50% of the recommended daily Vitamin C intake requirements in 100g of the dried fruit. You can also eat pitaya fruit as a good natural source of anti-oxidants which helps to prevent the dangers of free radicals which can cause cancer and other undesirable health detriments. Don’t worry about your cholesterol level or fats within Dragonfruit. These are mostly the healthy mono-unsaturated fats because there are so many seeds in the edible part of the fruit. There can be literally thousands of the small black seeds in any given dragonfruit, and like most seeds and nuts they have both fats and protein in them while the flesh of the fruit itself has virtually none. It would be literally impossible to remove the seeds from dragon fruit unless you pressed it through a strainer, as the seeds are very small and mixed evenly in the flesh. Fortunately, Dragonfruit is low in cholesterol and has little to no unhealthy cholesterol producing fats.

The dragonfruit cactus fruit is perhaps most common as the red dragon fruit (the red pitaya cactus fruit has red flesh or pulp, See Below). This is Hylocereus undatus, to be precise. This delectable and nutritious dragonfruit is the fruit of the vine-like cactus plant. Interestingly, the dragonfruit cactus blooms only at night and only a few times each year, blooming with beautiful huge fragrant blooms. Because of the night blooming, pollination is by nocturnal creatures such as moths and bats rather than the more common pollinators of the day such as bees. Pollination by fruit bats is actually a very important natural process, in spite of a lot of people’s aversion to the fuzzy little creatures! Since the dragonfruit cactus plant only comes to fruiting after a successful pollination – even self pollinating dragonfruit plants can fail to create dragonfruit cactus fruits when they don’t get the help of these essential nocturnal creatures to enable them to pollinate properly.

Sometimes it seems the number of ways people choose how to eat dragonfruit are about as many as there are people who enjoy eating pitaya cactus fruit. If you are someone who enjoys eating dragonfruit fresh, you can spoon the dragonfruit flesh out of the skin like you are eating a papaya. You can slice the dragonfruit, blend dragonfruit in a smoothie, eat dragonfruit with lemon or lime, and add dragonfruit to a fresh fruit salad. Some people prefer eating fresh dragonfruit chilled. That’s just how people like eating dragon fruit fresh! How to eat dragonfruit dried, that’s another story. Explore How to Eat Dragon Fruit at Foodlywise.com for more.

See next week’s recipe for a delectable Dragonfruit Pizza recipe. If you would like to discuss more on this subject please email me at diabeticcookbook@gmail.com or leave a reply below.