Nutrition: Fresh Fruit, No Matter How It's Sliced and Diced (Published 2006) (2024)

Contrary to expectations, new research has found that fresh fruit does not lose its nutritional value when sliced and packaged. Cutting and packaging have almost no effect on vitamin C and other antioxidants even when the fruit is kept for as long as nine days at refrigerator temperature, 41 degrees.

Using fresh pineapples, mangoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, strawberries and kiwis, the researchers found some variations among the fruits.

Cantaloupes, for example, had minimal reductions in vitamin C and beta carotenoids after the nine-day test, while pineapples exposed to light as part of the experiment actually increased in vitamin C content. After six days, the strawberries and kiwis appeared "under the limit of marketability," even though they suffered no loss of vitamin C and other nutrients.

The study will appear in the June 14 issue of The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

According to Adel Kader, the study's senior author and a professor at the University of California, Davis, the flavor of fresh-cut fruit can be judged by appearance, if only in retrospect. "In general," he said, "flavor life is about two-thirds of appearance life. That is, if a fresh-cut fruit lasts nine days based on visual quality, its flavor and nutritional life would be six days at optimal handling."

The researchers concluded that sliced and whole fruits deteriorate nutritionally at about the same rate at refrigerator temperature.