18-Health Benefits of Pomegranate – Pomegranates for Health and beauty

Health Benefits of Pomegranate – Pomegranates for Health and beauty.

One of my early childhood memories is of my father bringing home pomegranates to eat when they were in season. He would slice them in half and then show me how to pick out the pulp-covered seeds one by one with a small teaspoon. It was a time consuming process eating each seed individually, great care had to be taken digging into the fruit with the spoon and inevitably you ended up covered in sticky pomegranate juice.  Since then pomegranates have become much morepopular; not only to eat as a fruit, but also to drink aspomegranate juice, and taken as pomegranate supplements and eas to promote good health. and  beauty. Pomegranates have been cultivated since ancient times and they are native to Iran and theHimalayas. They have been grownin the Caucasus since antiquity and can now be found being cultivated around the world from South East Asia to California. Growing PomegranatesThe pomegranate’s Latin name is Punica granatum, and the word pomegranate is derived from the Latin pomum or apple and granatus which means seeded.  It is a deciduous shrub that has a small, bright red flower and bears a roundish fruit that is around the size of a small grapefruit.  The pomegranate fruit is covered in a thick skin that is reddish in colour and health and beauty contains around six hundred seeds that are encased in a juicy pulp.  These seeds and the surrounding pulpare called arils, and the arils can range in colour from white to a dark red. Pomegranates are a long living shrub, and there are pomegranate trees in Europe that are over two hundred years old, although the vigour and productivity of the trees tends to start declining after fifteen years or so.Pomegranates have been cultivated and eaten in Europe and the Middle East since ancient times and one of the earliestliterary references to pomegranates was in Homer’s Hymns.  Pomegranates in ancient mythology were regarded as symbols
of birth, death and then eternal life because of the multitude of seeds that they contained.   Pomegranates werealso linked in mythology to forbidden desire, because of the deep red colour of the outer skin that resembled the colour of blood.  In the South Caucasus, the decayed remains of pomegranates have been excavated that date back at least a thousand years. A dried out pomegranate was found preserved in thetomb of Queen Hatshepsut’s butler, andpomegranates werementioned on Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets.   health and beauty.Pomegranates were grown and eaten in Southeast Asia andChina in early times and may have been introduced by traders on the Silk Road or by early sea merchants.  The city of Granada in Spain is named after the pomegranate, and in early English the pomegranate was called ‘apple of Grenada’.  Pomegranates were ntroduced into the New World by the Spanish Conquistadors, and their cultivation spread rapidly through the Caribbean and Latin America. Pomegranates started to be cultivated in Britain in the seventeenth century, but did not fruit well, and were then introduced into North America by the early colonists.If you want to eat pomegranate as a fruit, you need to score the tough skin with a knife and then break open the fruit. You can then separate the pomegranate arils from the skin and the outer pulp relatively easily.  This task imade even easier by placing the pomegranate in a bowl of water, as the arils will sink to the bottom of the bowl and the skin and pulp will stay floating on the surface. The whole of the aril is eaten, both seed and pulp, but the taste and juice is derived almost entirely from the reddish, semi-translucent pulp.  In cooking, pomegranate arils are made into sauces, which are widely used in dishes in Iran and the Middle East,health and beauty as pomegranate has a flavour that is both sweet and sour. In India and Pakistan, wild pomegranate seeds are made into a spice called anardana, which is popularly used when making
curries and chutneys.health and beauty