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The Nutritional Values of Fruit Salad

Fruit salads are not only delicious and refreshing, they are also excellent sources of essential nutrients. Fruit contains natural sugars and essential vitamins and minerals including fiber, which helps with digestion. Eating a fruit salad daily can bolster your immune system, prevent diseases, reduce your risk of obesity and improve overall health. Fresh fruit of all kinds are readily available in any supermarket, and you can combine any number of them to make a nutritious fruit salad.

  1. Vitamins and Minerals

    • The specific vitamins and minerals in a fruit salad depend on which types of fruit it contains. According to the South Carolina Department of Health, "Fruits are nutrient-dense foods. They provide a substantial amount of vitamins and minerals with relatively few calories." Vitamin A, vitamin C, fiber, folate, inositol, anthocyanins, quercetin and potassium are just some of the nutrients a fruit salad may contain. The natural sugars in fruit are nutrient-dense, while the artificial sugars in processed food are calorie-dense.

    Disease Prevention

    • Fruit salad provides numerous long-term benefits and helps prevent many diseases and terminal illnesses. These include obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, cataracts, high blood pressure, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, allergies, joint inflammation and some types of cancer. Fruit can reduce the risk of high cholesterol. Eating fruit is also said to slow the effects of aging and increase longevity.

    Weight Loss

    • Fruit is very low in sodium, which reduces the chance of gaining water weight. Fruit is an efficient source of energy and keeps the stomach feeling full, thus reducing the need to consume other high-calorie foods. Most fruits are quite sweet and eating them can help reduce one's cravings for unhealthy, sugary foods. A diet comprised of ample fruit and vegetables tends to be low in calories and rich in nutrients, the ideal diet for a person trying to lose weight.

    Canned Vs. Fresh Fruit

    • It's best to use fresh fruit when making a fruit salad, though canned fruits are fine as long as they are canned in water and not syrup. Fruits canned in syrup have much higher sugar content, and very often they are sweetened using high fructose corn syrup. Canned fruit has to be boiled before it is canned, and a lot of nutrients are lost in the packaging process. If you do make a fruit salad with canned fruit, try to use canned fruit that contains real fruit juice and reduced sugar.

    Varieties of Fruit Salad

    • There is really no limit to the kind of fruit salad you can make, though keep in mind that the nutritional content always changes depending on what ingredients you include. Adding things like honey, skim milk, cottage cheese, yogurt and other foods can increase the nutritional content of a fruit salad and improve taste. Frozen fruit salads can also be quite delicious, and they essentially retain all the same nutrients as non-frozen fruit.

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