How Berries Can Benefit Your Body
If you are looking for a way to lose weight, boost energy, or just trying to find a healthier lifestyle, than you may want to consider a diet that is heavily focused on eating a lot of berries. Berries are great for bodies because they provide an abundant source of nutrients such as antioxidants, fiber, and vitamins. In return, this can boost your body’s immune system, create energy, and rid your body of toxins and fat given the amount of water and fiber that fruit tends to have. So here are some of the main reasons you should eat a lot of berries to benefit your body.
Antioxidants
Of all the things that berries have, the most important is that they are packed with antioxidants. Antioxidants are what can prevent or slow damage of free radicals on cells by inhibiting oxidation. This allows your body’s key organs to operate at optimum levels and prevent them from breaking down easily over time. While antioxidants can come naturally from many other sources, it is found that one of the easiest sources to obtain large amounts of antioxidants is from fruit.
All fruit has some level of antioxidants, but the fruits that tend to have the most are berries, such as blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. You may not always be able to have raw fruits available; however, you can find the delicious taste of blackberry in blackberry syrup from Monin. It has a complex taste of tart sweetness and is great for making cocktails, iced teas, lemonades, and more.
High in Fiber
For those who are looking to try to reduce weight, it is recommended to decrease the use of added sugar and go for foods that have high amounts of fiber. While there are many foods to choose from, berries are one of the top recommended sources of soluble fiber in a diet.
Fiber does a few things, the main of which is to slow down the movement of food through the digestive tract, which in return makes you feel less hungry and fuller. This is essential during weight loss where psychologically it is challenging to lose weight due to the feeling of hunger. In return, this can reduce calorie intake and make you feel more in control of a weight loss plan.
More importantly, the intake of fiber always slows the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream, which is the main catalyst in fat gain. By slowing this consumption, the liver does not get overworked, and, therefore, can properly metabolize sugar as energy instead of storing it as fat. More importantly, eating fiber can help control insulin levels to protect people from developing type two diabetes.
Nutrients
Berries contain large amounts of nutrients, which are critical to helping the body develop and maintain itself properly. Perhaps the most common and important nutrient berries have is vitamin C, which is essential to developing a healthy immune system. A handful of blackberries, for example, contain 35% of your recommended daily value intake of vitamin C. Strawberries, by comparison, are even better, as a cup of strawberries has 150% of a recommended daily value of vitamin C. Therefore, just a few servings of fruit a day is all you need to reach your required intake of vitamin C.
Among other nutrients, berries tend to have are one such as vitamin K, copper, manganese, and folate. All these nutrients play key roles to prevent dangerous medical conditions such as blood clotting, osteoporosis, anemia, regulating blood sugar, and overall heart health. Among other things, like trying to lose weight and gain energy, berries, more importantly, help keep your body going normal.
Overall, berries need to become a more standard part of a person’s diet. It is important not to overload on berries as they do have a lot of natural sugar, but in moderation, they can do your body a lot of good in the long run and the short run. They are a key part of the balanced diet and will play a role in what healthy lifestyle approach you are trying to achieve.