JaanYar
Chapter 1 of 15

Guava

If You Read Nothing Else

A whole green guava beside a halved one on a dark surface, the cut half showing pink flesh packed with small hard seeds
A ripe guava is green or yellow outside; the cut half shows pink or white flesh full of small hard seeds.

About four times the vitamin C of an orange, in one fruit.

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You eat skin and seeds, so the fibre is high — around 9 grams in a cup.

Pink varieties also carry lycopene (the red pigment in tomatoes), the pigment found in tomato.

Guava is a quiet record-holder. One fruit gives you more vitamin C than several oranges, plus plenty of fibre because you eat the skin and seeds too. It tastes somewhere between a pear and a strawberry, with a fragrance that can fill a room. In tropical countries, people value the leaf as much as the fruit. Guava leaf tea is one of the world's most widely used traditional remedies for diarrhoea, and small trials have supported it reasonably well.

Known to botanists as Psidium guajava.