Canned fruits are made of yellow peaches, apples, litchis, strawberries, and hawthorn. They can prolong the storage time of fruits and preserve their tastes. Canned fruits are widely used in picnics, travels, rescue, as well as daily food. Many people are worried about the healthiness of canned fruits. In this blog, I will resolve this doubt.
How are canned fruits made?
Many people worry about the nutrition loss in canned fruits, because they don’t know how the canned fruits are made. They believe the canning process is complicated and destroys much of the nutrition content.
In fact, the canned fruit production process is simple.
- Heat up the fruits to kill all bacteria.
- Sterilize the can or bottles.
- Feed the heated fruits to the sterilized cans.
- Seal the cans while they are hot.
- After the cans cools down, the inside air shrink and the pressure drop, which will tighten the caps.
As the inside bacteria has been eliminated and the outside bacteria have been prevented, they wouldn't affect the fruits. As long as the sterilization is thorough, and the sealing is tight enough, the canned fruits won’t go bad without added with preservatives.
Are canned fruits healthy?
Canned fruits usually adopt pasteurization technology, with the heating temperature under 100 ℃.The minerals in fruits, such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, won’t be affected by heating. The dietary fibers will also be preserved. Some of the vitamins and folic acid will break down by heating, and others dissolve in the fruit soup. The followings are the nutrition loss in fruit canning process:
- Vitamin A: The fat soluble vitamins like βcarotene suffers little loss in the canning process. Researches have proved that heating can increase their stability. After heating, the glutathione in tomatoes can effectively prevent Prostate Cancer.
- Vitamin C and folic acid: they will get lost in the heating process, but with most dissolving in the fruit soup. The remained vitamin C are stable in canned fruits.
- Vitamin B1: canned soy food preserves more nutrition than other cooking process.
- Minerals: potassium, calcium, and magnesium won’t have any loss in the canning process.
- Dietary fibers: Canning won’t cause any loss to the dietary fibers, by contrast, it can promote their dissolution and make them easier for body to absorb.
Therefore, although canned fruits have certain nutrition loss, they are still good substitute for fresh fruits. As long as you eat them properly, they are beneficial to you health. But for some canned fruits with high sugar or salt quantity, you shouldn’t eat them too much.
Are canned fruits added with preservatives?
Canned fruits can be stored for over a year. Many people believe it is added with preservatives, which is harmful to our health. But the fact is, canned fruits don’t need to be added with preservatives.
The keys to the long storage time of canned fruits are vacuum sealing and sterilization. In the canned fruits production, the fruits and bottles have been sterilized, the air inside have been expelled, and the fruits have been completely isolated from the outside.
Even though some canned fruits contains preservatives, they are safe as long as the preservative content conforms to food safety standard. They won’t do harm to human body.
Canned fruit vs fresh fruit
Compared with fresh fruits, canned fruits have a certain nutrition loss due to the pasteurization process. But if the fruit is not fresh, or if you have stored the fresh fruits in fridges for a period, they will also have nutrition loss.
Besides, in the heating process, large part of the fruit nutrition have dissolved in the soup. If we can drink the soup together with the fruits in cans, we can obtain similar nutrients as fresh fruits, and more nutrients than stored fruits.
Dietician recommend: if the fruit cans are not added with extra water, we’d better eat them together with the soup. If it is added with extra sugar, we’d better discard the soup. Too much sugar intake will do harm to our health.
