When it comes to eating healthy, fruits and vegetables are the first things you want to add to your diet plan. The health benefits of consuming fruits and vegetables cannot be overemphasized.
Fruits and veggies contain a variety of nutrients, including dietary fiber, potassium, antioxidants, vitamins, folic acid, and can generally help to burn excess body fat.
The beautiful thing about eating these plants is that there’s no such thing as having too much of them. Vegetables and fruits have more nutrients and a meager amount of calories, so it is safe to eat as many fruits and veggies as you can anytime you want. Isn’t that great?
However, some of the fruits and vegetables we see in the grocery stores these days look different from the ones we are familiar with, and we wonder if they were imported from other parts of the world or something strange has happened to them.
To grow healthier, more abundant, and disease resistant fruits and vegetables, some of our food growers have decided to create new plants for our consumption. These are the hybrids!
Intentional cross-breeding of two different species of a vegetable or fruit creates hybrid fruits and vegetables.
This new offspring of the crossbreeding process will possess the best character traits of both parents that were used for hybridization.
Though this hybrid plants could be tastier and pretty to the eyes, most times the parent fruits or vegetables are more nutritious than the hybrids or could have equal amount of nutrients.
However, if you are in the mood to explore new fruits and veggies, hybrid greens are healthy enough to try.
Below is a list of some really nice hybrid vegetables and fruits you can get from your local grocery store.
1. Seedless pepper (Angello)
You know how it is that you have to open up a pepper and take out the seeds before you proceed to chop or blend? It can be time consuming if you have plenty of bell pepper to cut open. Well, this seedless hybrid pepper helps you skip that step, so you can just proceed to chopping or blending it.
This pepper is not only seedless, it equally has a sweet taste. In fact, it is sweeter than the normal bell pepper as its level of Brix (this is how the amount of sweetness in veggies are calculated) is 25% higher than that of the everyday bell pepper. If you love your pepper both crunchy and sweet, then the seedless bell pepper was made just for your taste buds.
When it comes to nutritional value, they are just perfect because they have very high level of vitamin C just like their parent bell pepper and offer 200 percent of your daily requirement. That’s some sweet peppery goodness!
2. Grapple
The funny name of this hybrid fruit gives it all away at first hearing. A grapple is a cross breed of grapes and apples. The grapple fruit looks and an apple but tastes like a sweeter and crispier version of a grape fruit mixed with an apple. Very nice taste combination if I must add.
Eating this fruit is believed to reduce the chances of cancer and also reduce high levels of cholesterol. Though fruits and vegetables are known to have less calories, the grapple fruit has plenty of calories. So, if you are in need of some calories, this is a suggestion you might find both tasty and helpful.
The grapple fruit has 2% vitamin C, 8% vitamin A, 95% calories, 1% calcium, 8% carbohydrate, and 1% iron. like some other fruits, the grapple fruit is seasonal and starts its season towards the end of October and the start of November.
3. Grape fruit (citrus paradisi )
Hold on a second, what! Yea right, I bet you didn’t know that the citrus grape fruit is a hybrid of sweet orange and pummelo. This fruit has a reddish, white, or pink inside with an orange yellow skin and is great for skincare and eye sight.
Just like the grapple fruit, eating citrus paradisi helps to reduce the risks of cancer and lower high level of cholesterol. It is also rich in vitamin C as it contains 78% of it, vitamin A, vitamin B6, potassium, antioxidants, protein, thiamin, folate, and aids digestion.
4. Broccolini
If you are thinking a mix of broccoli and some other vegetable you are not sure of, then you have it almost figured out. Though this is a new hybrid vegetable, it is already a staple in Japanese dishes. This newly created vegetable is a cross breed of broccoli and a kind of Japanese kale known as kai-lain.
Rumor has it that this vegetable tastes really good and is less bitter than the regular broccoli which is good news for people who do not like the bitter taste of broccoli. It also reportedly has a sweet taste that almost mimics the taste of an asparagus.
This vegetable has an excellent amount of vitamin C reaching up to 150% of your daily requirement.
5. The fair child tangerine
You know those small orange yellow easy to peel citrus fruits with a delicious taste? yea, those little sweet hearts are a cross breed of the Orlando tangelos and the clementine tangelos that have anti-inflammatory properties.
The fair child tangerine can be grown at home in warm parts of the world or protected from wind and extremely cold conditions. This fruit is not only tasty, it also has very useful qualities that you will find almost too good to be true.
It has the ability to cleanse your blood and possesses amazing antiseptic properties in its skin thus it can be used on wounds to kill bacteria and help them heal faster. It is rich in vitamin C and contains 45% calories and 16% carbohydrate.
6. Tangelo
Alright! these citrus fruits are always victims of the mix. Well, it appears that the tangelo is a hybrid of a tangerine and a grapefruit. That explains its sweet taste like that of a tangerine and its growth to a size as large as a grapefruit.
Tangelos are rich in vitamins, dietary fibers, and can help with common cold and sore throats. Tangelos are rich in calories and are anti-cancer.
I guess these hybrid fruits and veggies are worth a trial after all. However, before you purchase vegetables, make sure to confirm if they have been genetically modified. Some genetically modified foods are not advisable for consumption.
Enjoy your fruits and vegetables!
