Banana Exotic berry with many healthy properties

Bananas: the healthy yellow fruits
They taste baked, grilled, as a shake, in a smoothie and of course just pure. Bananas are a popular food and staple food for over 400 million people worldwide. But what exactly are we releasing when peeling a banana??

Bananas are good energy suppliers. (Image: nata_vkusidey / fotolia.com)

The banana fruit is botanically among the berries. In the cultivars grown today this is still recognizable by the blackish rudiments of the ovules in the pulp. The wild forms, however, still have many hard, up to one centimeter seeds in the pulp. The popular and popular fruit or dessert banana Musa × paradisiaca is one of the most commonly grown species or hybrids of banana plants.

The fruits have a high content of carbohydrates, which are converted into sugar during maturation. This makes the banana a sweet and readily available source of energy. In addition, they are rich in minerals such as potassium and magnesium as well as trace elements and vitamins, especially B vitamins. In addition to the high health value, bananas are easily digestible and have a calming effect on stomach and intestinal disorders. Therefore, they are also suitable for toddlers. Soluble and insoluble fiber promotes digestion and regulates cholesterol levels.

Fruit bananas are mainly eaten fresh, for example as a snack or in fruit salads. They are processed into smoothies, ice cream, milk mix drinks, puree, juice, liqueur or dried as chips. Plantains - also known as flour or vegetable banana - do not taste sweet, because the starch contained in the maturation is not converted into sugar. For this you have to cook, steam, roast or fry them. Alternatively, they can be dried and ground into flour, which can be used to make pastries or cakes. Due to their high starch content, the plantains in their main growing countries of Africa serve as a staple food.

Fruit bananas are grown mainly in the states of Southeast Asia, South and Central America. The goods available from us mainly come from Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica. These are usually Cavendish varieties, which were originally characterized by a resistance to the trigger of the so-called Panama disease, the fungus Fusarium oxysporium. However, breeds of the pathogen have evolved and are now threatening the Cavendish varieties, which account for more than 40 percent of production worldwide and virtually all of export. Infested plants wither and no longer produce fruit. The aim now is to breed new disease-resistant varieties, or to replace the Cavendish monocultures with a wider variety of banana varieties.

For their growth, the banana plants need a consistently moist and humid climate, nutrient-rich soil and sufficient moisture. The plant is a perennial whose female flowers develop the ripe fruit within three months. From an inflorescence develops a fruit stand - a so-called "tuft" - with up to 300 bananas. The fruits are always harvested green and specifically matured.

By the way: ripe bananas quickly get dark spots. Therefore, it is recommended to buy green bananas and let them ripen. Depending on whether the fruits are to ripen quickly or slowly, you can either put targeted ethylene-releasing fruits such as apples in the vicinity, or just to avoid this. A storage in the refrigerator is not recommended, because the shell turns brown and the aroma suffers. Heike Stommel, www.bzfe.de