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.

Webchats

 

HEALTH BENEFITS OF BLACKCURRANTS

 

WHAT ARE FREE RADICALS AND ANTIOXIDANTS

 

WHAT ARE ANTHOCYANINS

 

BENEFITS OF VITAMIN C

 

CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH

 

AGEING AND BRAIN FUNCTION

 

URINARY TRACT HEALTH

 

VISION

 

BLACKCURRANT FRUIT COMPOSITION

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benefits of Vitamin C

 

Why is Vitamin C good for you?

 

The most well-known health benefit of blackcurrants is that they contain large amounts of Vitamin C. Vitamins are substances we need to enable our bodies to live, grow and reproduce normally. Vitamin C is an essential nutrient - it cannot be made by the human body and we must therefore eat foods which contain it (Bibliography Ref: 13). Because the body breaks down Vitamin C very quickly and does not store very much, we need to eat Vitamin C containing foods regularly, preferably every day.

 

 

Reference: McCance & Widdowson, The Composition of Foods, 5th Ed, RSC & MAFF

 

We must consume a minimum amount of Vitamin C to prevent scurvy. The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for Vitamin C is 60 mg. This is well above the level required to prevent scurvy to ensure that our bodies stay healthy. However, apart from the world's poorest countries, diets in the 21st century are very unlikely to contain less than this minimum amount.

 

Vitamin C looks after body tissue health

 

Vitamin C is needed by the body to make collagen, an important structural material in bones, teeth, skin, ligaments (that connect bones to other bones in joints), tendons (that connect muscles to bones) and cartilage (that helps to provide cushioning in joints).

 

Collagen is responsible for skin elasticity and its degradation leads to wrinkles. Adequate Vitamin C is therefore necessary to maintain the health of all of these body tissues and deficiency can result in tooth loss, joint pains and problems with bone and connective tissue (Bibliography Ref: 14, 15).

 

Vitamin C helps iron absorption

 

Vitamin C helps the body absorb and use the iron we get from vegetables and cereals (Bibliography Ref: 16, 17, 18, 19). Iron is an important mineral because it enables blood to carry oxygen to all our bodily tissues. People who don't get enough iron from their food become anaemic.

 

Vitamin C boosts the immune system

 

Scientific studies have shown that Vitamin C can boost many different parts of the immune system (Bibliography Ref: 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27). For example, Vitamin C is essential for the functioning of white blood cells (Bibliography Ref: 28, 29).

 

Vitamin C is necessary for the immune system to function and extra Vitamin C could give us more power to fight illness.

 

Vitamin C can help fight colds

 

It has not yet been proven whether or not Vitamin C can prevent infections such as colds and flu (Bibliography Ref: 30, 31, 32). However, if you do catch a cold, Vitamin C can help to reduce the symptoms and speed up your recovery (Bibliography Ref: 33, 34).

 

Some scientific studies suggest that levels of white blood cells and Vitamin C in the body decrease when you suffer a cold (Bibliography Ref: 35, 36, 37). Therefore, taking extra Vitamin C can prevent the fall in Vitamin C levels (Bibliography Ref: 38) which suggests that the body may need a greater amount of Vitamin C during illness, especially when fighting an infection.

 

Vitamin C as a healthy antioxidant

 

Vitamin C also keeps us healthy by acting as an antioxidant (Bibliography Ref: 39, 40, 41), protecting our bodies from free radical damage. Scientists think that by consuming lots of antioxidants regularly, we can delay age-related diseases, which occur as a result of our organs "wearing out".

 

Research suggests that Vitamin C can help to:

 

  • Improve memory in older people (Bibliography Ref: 42, 43)
  • Enable us to do more exercise for longer and recover from exercise better, by giving us healthy connective tissues e.g. ligaments, tendons, cartilage etc (Bibliography Ref: 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49)
  • Look after eyesight, by reducing oxidative damage to lens protein - an important cause of cataracts (Bibliography Ref: 50, 51, 52, 53, 54)
  • Protect our bodies against environmental pollutants by inactivating free radicals (Bibliography Ref: 55, 56, 57)
  • Preserve healthy teeth and gums and prevent periodontal disease by maintaining the resilience of gums towards bacteria (Bibliography Ref: 58, 59, 60, 61, 62)

 

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