Bananas can be a worthy addition to your diet - just read about the facts.

Bananas are no longer really exotic fruits, they are one of the more common types of fruits we buy. Yet people don't usually know much about them or their role in proper nutrition. While the banana diet's effectiveness is often questioned, the fruit itself can have a great effect on your health. Thanks to the abundance of potassium, folic acid and many other chemicals banana can play an important role in our nutrition on several occasions.

Thanks to the high potassium level, eating bananas reduces the danger of a heart stroke. The researchers point out that high potassium intake reduces this danger 1.5 times. Everyone will agree that eating a few bananas every week is a small price for minimizing the chances for a stroke.

The large amount of folic acid is a necessary addition to every pregnancy diet to prevent damaging the fetus' nervous system (neural tube defects). What is more, there are some evidences that folic acid reduces the risk of cancer, too. It certainly plays an important banana role in the synthesis and repair of DNA and the lack of it results in DNA damages that in turn may cause cancer. Bananas are one of the better natural sources of folic acid.

Bananas are also a good source of vitamin C, though they share this trait with most other fruits. A single banana provides as much as 15 per cent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C. The vitamin is required for synthesis of several important hormones including dopamine and adrenaline and acts as a natural antioxidant with the anti-cancer and anti-aging effect.

As a source of fibers, bananas help also fight the high level of cholesterol by suppressing the production of LDL-cholesterol that is responsible for arteriosclerosis.

The fruits are carbohydrate-rich, but low-fat food. They give you a lot of energy, but they have quite a lot of calories - 90 kcal for 100g of bananas eaten. That's why they are often used as a valuable dietary supplement, but only rarely as a main part of a diet. Though there is something called "banana diet", the information about its effectiveness are still a bit unclear. Until the banana diet will be backed up by solid facts, it will remain only a dietary theory at best.

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