Burn
fat, keep your body in shape, avoid stress and fight cancer!
Mom probably gets you 2 liters of Grapefruit Juice to chug when you have a really bad cold or a nasty flu. When your body is under stress and you suffer the first symptoms of exhaustion: a cold, allergies kicking in, or worse—the flu knocking you out for 5 days, you need something to help you fight back and recover. And when you're back, keep at it—with Grapefruit Juice!
A grapefruit looks like a larger orange and is a natural cross-breeding between the orange and the pomelo, its skin looks like an orange, but its flesh comes in white, pink or red pulp and tastes rather tartly sour with a hint of alkaline bitterness. The grapefruit grows in clusters or bunches like grapes, and the juice or pulp of the grapefruit tastes like pomelo but more acridly sour.
Really Good for You and You Know It!
Grapefruit doesn’t only contain vitamin C which is your shield against the cold or the flu. Each serving of grapefruit packs all natural sugars, essential oils like limonene, pinene and citral, high amounts of vitamin C, and smaller amounts of vitamin A, B complex, E and K. Grapefruit is also packed with plenty of calcium, folate, phosphorus, and potassium. The best part are the added antioxidants or nutritive phytonutrients—liminoids, flavonoids, lycopene and glucarates—all of which help fight cancer and reduce stress. At the end of a long and tiring day, drink a glass of grapefruit juice to dispel all fatigue and tiredness.
When eating or juicing grapefruit, peel off the rind but keep as much of the albedo intact as possible as it contains the highest amount of valuable bioflavonoids and anti-cancer agents.
The juice of the grapefruit is a very potent alkaline fixing agent after it is digested and absorbed by your body. Stress wears down your body if it is too acidic, and cancer thrives in a highly acidic body environment. Grapefruit juice can flush away excess estrogen to help women avoid breast cancer too.
Grapefruit juice helps promote digestion by increasing the flow of gastric juices to help your body absorb more nutrients. Eat the fruit together with its albedo and pith for extra fiber that aids bowel movement.
A Fix for Everything: From Sleep Problems to Sore Throat
A drink of grapefruit juice before bedtime, helps to promote sleep and alleviates insomnia. It can also prevent water retention and swelling of the legs during pregnancy if included in one's diet.
Freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice helps relieve sore throats and soothes coughs. Grapefruit helps prevent stomach and pancreatic cancer. Grapefruit containes a fat-burning enzyme which helps absorb and reduce the starch and sugar in the body. The rich pink and red colors of grapefruit come form lycopene, a carotenoid phytonutrient. and a very powerful antiocxidant that retards cancer tumor activity. Naringenin, a flavonoid concentrated in grapefruit is one of its many powerful antioxidant that helps repair damaged DNA in human cancer cells reported a lab study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. Naringenin helps restore health to damaged DNA by inducing two enzymes that repair DNA during the replication stage.
How to Select and Store
Bruises or discolored skin do NOT affect the taste nor the quality of nutrients in this healing fruit. Signs of overriping include soft spots at the stem end of the fruit and areas that appear watersoaked. Grapefruits should be firm, yet slightly springy when pressed gently. You can get them anytime of year but are bountiful and in season from November to April. For the most antioxidants, choose fully ripened grapefruit--they have fully red pulp inside--lycopene content at its peak. If you will not be consuming the fruit within three days or so, you can store them in the refrigerator crisper where they will keep fresh for two to three weeks.
