They're as pretty as a picture. They're a real eye-catcher on the market! But what do they have in their bellies? What are they really worth?
Our Baouw nutritionist Benoît Nave, holder of the European Diploma in Micronutrition, Food, Prevention and Health (Paris Descartes Faculty of Medicine) in 2019, answers these questions!
Eat your five fruits and vegetables a day’ and you'll get your “ration” of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants of all kinds! But what is this nutritional ‘law’ based on?
On the average antioxidant content of plants. But not today's plants. That of plants we ate 30 or 40 years ago!
Problem or not? As science has progressed, perhaps today's fruit and vegetables are of better quality?
This apple looks so perfect. It looks so good: if its ‘coat’ is anything to go by, it'll soon become the queen of apples! Full of vitality. What does it have in its belly? What's it worth nutritionally?
You'd have to eat 100 conventional (non-organic) Grany Smith apples every day to cover your needs! Where three organic Reinettes do the job... So what's too expensive?
Let's compare the nutritional qualities of this apple with another, picked from the same orchard as our grandparents.
ruits, comme les légumes, is essentially made up of water, followed by sugars and fibre (95% of the total) and the remaining 5% of vitamins, minerals and trace elements. The vitality of a food is measured by its nutritional density, in the remaining 5%, which contains all the key elements that enable an infinite number of reactions to take place in our bodies at any given moment. This is where our health depends! What do these non-organic apples really have in their bellies? We often hear that ‘organic’ is expensive... but do these fictitious ‘foods’ really deserve to be called food?
THE FINDINGS
The evidence is overwhelming for fruit from intensive production. If we take vitamin C as an example, a Grany Smith contains 2 to 3 mg of vitamin C per 100g. A Reinette or an Ariane 20 to 30 mg, a Transparente de Croncels (from an old orchard)... 400 mg! What's more, you have to peel a non-organic fruit: a dozen different chemicals are needed to give it a colour and appearance worthy of the beauty standards demanded by industry... 80% of vitamin C is found in the peel. Do your sums: 20% of 3mg = 0.6mg compared with 30 to 400mg. A factor of 50 to 700! As a reminder, you need between 60 and 100mg of vitamin C every day - that's around a hundred conventional supermarket Grannies... compared with three organic Reinettes!
There's no need to peel (we don't even recommend it) a fruit from an untreated orchard or one grown organically. The vitamins are in the skin!
What explains this difference?
Everything! The variety. The soils in which fruit trees are grown, in monoculture, with constant weeding and tractor ploughing, have become considerably poorer. The frantic quest for yields has resulted in the appearance of plant holograms. Our supermarket apple looks, smells and tastes like an apple, but from a nutritional point of view it's just a ghost, devoid of any vital substance! We're being sold a bill of goods!
Your Baouw are prepared with real food inside, organically grown: nutrients in bars! And bursting with vitamins: vitamin C, vitamin B, vitamin E, beta-carotene...
Ces calculs ont été réalisés par le nutritionniste Baouw Benoît Nave, titulaire du diplôme européen Micronutrition, Alimentation, Prévention, Santé (faculté de médecine Paris Descartes) en 2019.
