Overview
Blackcurrants don’t just taste delicious, eating them can provide your body with vital nutrients and help to protect your body against a myriad of ills including cardiovascular disease and ageing.
Eat a Rainbow!
We all know that eating 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day is the optimum way to keep our bodies healthy and get essential nutrients into our diet. But this is often easier said than done! By visualising this task as a rainbow, it may help to keep healthy eating on track by eating a wide variety of different coloured fruits and vegetables.
Blackcurrants are full of health promoting antioxidants, called anthocyanins, which give blackcurrants their distinctive dark purple colour. The darker the blackcurrant, the more anthocyanins it contains and the better it is for you. British blackcurrants are grown and bred especially for their deep colour, making them extra good for you.
Blackcurrants are also especially rich in Vitamin C - containing more than three times as much as an orange! They can even help prevent joint inflammation, eyestrain and urinary infections.
Find out more about how eating blackcurrants can help keep you healthy.
Vision
Can blackcurrants help my eyesight?
Scientists have discovered that dietary antioxidants play an important role in maintaining eye health and vision, particularly in preventing cataract.
Cataract is a common degenerative eye disease and is associated with getting older. It results from the build-up of oxidised proteins in the lens of the eye which prevents light from entering.
Some antioxidants like Vitamin C have been found to reduce the risk of cataract, but whether or not the other blackcurrant antioxidants offer similar protection is not yet known.
In a scientific study on humans, blackcurrant juice containing anthocyanins helped the volunteers' eyes to adjust to darkness better.
This reduced the feeling of 'tired eyes' whilst working at a computer screen (Bibliography Ref: 95). However, a similar study using bilberry anthocyanins did not reveal the same results (Bibliography Ref: 96).
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