Exotic Produce--More Nutritious?
 
New Items on the produce aisle can round out your daily dietary requirements.

The fact that a kiwifruit has more vitamin C than an orange makes you wonder about the benefits of all those other exotic fruits and vegetables cropping up in produce bins. Here's the rundown for an assortment of unusual yet nutritionally rich produce.

Vitamins A and C
Ten Asian litchis (tiny sweet fruits) provide 72 milligrams of vitamin C.

Gai choy, a leafy green Chinese cabbage used in stir-fries, is a rich source of vitamins A and C--it has more than four times the amount in regular green cabbage.

Loquats (Japanese plums) have a heftier dose of vitamin A than American plums and about the same amount of vitamin C.

Fiber
Passion fruit has a lemony pulp and delivers nearly seven grams of fiber in a three-ounce portion.
Egg-shaped tree tomatoes, or tamarillos, beat tomatoes hands down in fiber content, carrying more than twice as much in their tart flesh.

Phytoestrogens
Edamame, fresh soybeans that resemble green peas, offer generous amounts of phytoestrogens, disease-fighting chemicals that may lower your risks of cancer and heart disease.

Folic acid
Latin feijoas, with their unusual pineapple-mint flavor, have three times as much folic acid as pineapples.

 

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