As May beckons the even more piercing heat, the only saving grace are the mangoes. Fondly called the King of Fruits, mango is rich in vitamin A. The lesser known fact is that mango is also our country’s national fruit. Quite a favourite among most fruit eaters, both raw and ripe mangoes can be used to make delicious food preparations.
While it may be surprising to find anyone who doesn’t like to binge on these seasnal fruits, not many are aware of the fact that they contain nutrients that can help clear the skin, improve eye health, stave off diabetes, and even prevent the formation and spread of cancer.
General Benefits
The fruit contains vitamins A, C and D along with beta-carotene. In Unani medicine, mangoes are used to remove toxins, treat anaemia and heal the nervous system. Ayurvedic medicine uses the dried mango flowers to treat diarrhoea, dysentery as well as urinary tract infections (UTI). Not only the fruit, but mango leaves, seeds, roots and bark, all contain healthy nutrients. While the high iron count in mangoes treats anaemia, mango pulp is added to facial products because of its ability to prevent acne by cleaning pores.
Research recently presented at a meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) for instance, revealed that eating mangoes every day can help moderate and even lower blood sugar levels, despite their natural sugar content. This is good news for people with type-two diabetes who may benefit from consuming mangoes regularly as part of a low-sugar diet.
For their study, researchers tested the effects of mangoes on a group of obese animals, which were fed freeze-dried mango every day for 12 weeks. Based on the data, mango consumption was found to result in a significant decline in blood sugar levels.
Cancer curing
Mango compounds also apparently effectively target and eliminate harmful cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone, a phenomenon that is unique to nature and is nowhere to be found in pharmaceutical-based medicine. Other popular methods of cancer treatment, chemotherapy and radiation damage healthy cells along with malignant cells, which is why they are a failure as far as long-term survival is concerned.