Here is a post for those of you who love fruit. Oranges are famous for their vitamin C content, for good reason, but they are often overlooked for other nutrients. Here is what I found:
| Oranges – 2 medium Valencia (242 g) | Adult Daily Values | |
| Calories | 118.6 | |
| Vitamin C | 117.4 | 70 – 90 mg |
| Folate | 94.4 | 400 mcg |
| Calcium | 96.8 | 1000 – 1200 mg |
| Potassium | 433.2 | 4700 mg |
Almost 100 mg of calcium in two oranges?! I find this to be impressive for a sweet fruit. Generally, I have found that many types of leafy greens are calcium stars, but there are actually several sweet fruits that contain notable amounts of calcium, and the orange is one of them.
Additionally, when I am teaching our Science of Raw Food Nutrition I class, a question that I enjoy asking our students is “what food is high in potassium?” The most popular answer by far is (drum roll please) ……… as you may have guessed - banana. In addition to bananas, many other fruits contain notable amounts of potassium, including oranges. Per calorie, oranges contain a similar amount of potassium to bananas:
| Banana – one medium (118 g) | Adult Daily Values | |
| Calories | 105 | |
| Potassium | 422.4 | 4700 mg |
Please note that the potassium comparison in oranges and bananas is per calorie, if one was comparing them per weight, the potassium content of bananas would be greater than oranges.
Folate is popularly found in leafy greens, and here we find it in oranges, too.
We enjoy oranges in smoothies and occasionally juiced. We recently found a large quantity of oranges at the South San Francisco wholesale produce market. We put them in our fridge to keep them fresh in our recent heat spell:
As you can see, we have lots of green veggies in our fridge, too!
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