Dried Fruits

Dried Mango, Dried Papaya, Raisins, Dried Pineapple and Many Other Dried Fruits -- Just Not Prunes, Please

We need lots of water, but it doesn't have to be in the fruits we eat.

Of course, dried fruits are simply what's left of a fruit after you take the majority of the water inside it, dehydrating it of almost all moisture.

Dried Fruits Taste Delicious - Very Sweet

I was thinking about this just the other day, when I was thinking about the power of the word "juice." We use it to mean the power of something, such as how we talk about the power of "link juice" when we're talking about how backlinks can help raise a website's status in the search engines, especially in Google.

In one of Anthony Robbins' books he riffs on how juice means the emotion that gets people to really feel motivated and empowered to move toward what they want.

And when we talk about something that's old and wrinkled, we're implying that it's dried out, like the skin of somebody who's showing their age.

That's the analogy that made me really believe the doctor who wrote the book on the importance of drinking lots of water: YOU'RE NOT SICK, YOU'RE THIRSTY and YOUR BODY'S MANY CRIES FOR WATER.

He pointed out how when we think of somebody young and health, such as a baby, we think of someone who's full of water, because they do have more water in their tissues and their skin than the elderly.

Of course, there is such a thing as having too much water, at least in the wrong places. A lot of people with poor blood circulation and high blood pressure have water accumulating in tissues where it shouldn't. That's why those people have such flabby underarms and other swollen tissues, especially when they don't take their water pills.

Yet, what I thought about, is how dried fruit is not a bad thing, even though its juice is gone.

Dried Fruits Make Great Snacks - Kids Love Them

Think of: raisins made from grapes, dried apples, dried pineapples, dried pears, dried peaches, and so on. I've eaten dried papayas and mangoes in Asia, and they're good. And dried banana chips are also a good snack. These are all highly sweet, though -- they have a lot of concentrated sugars, fructose.

The one fruit which doesn't seem to benefit from being dried out is plums. Think about it -- dried plums are prunes. Prunes are the classic example of being dried out and not good for anything except to initiate evacuation.

Now that I think about it, I wonder why we speak of "prune" juice. It must be "plum" juice, really. Plums have water in them to make juice with, not prunes.

But plums taste good, so you'd think plum juice would too. Yet we start to wrinkle our mouths whenever we think of drinking prune juice.

Hopefully, however, when fruits are dried out they don't really lose their juice, just their water. There's a big difference. When you eat dried fruit, you want to ingest the same nutrition that's there in the juice, along with the fiber and any other vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals present in the solid part of the plant, which is missed when we drink the juice instead of eating the whole food.

So eating fruits dry should be healthier than drinking the juice, because it doesn't contain all the nutrition of the fruit itself, plus it contains such concentrated sugars that it has a high glycemic index and load.

Here's a video on dried fruits:

Next: Emergency Foods -- foods to have on hand just in case.