Suzanne Graham

I got to try a new super beneficial food! That is exciting to me! When I first started the BTD, I enjoyed searching the isles of my grocery and health food store looking for beneficial food that I had never tried. It was quite an adventure. Experimenting with the new beneficials took away the sting of not eating old favorite avoids. But gradually, I tried all of the beneficials that were available locally. I sighed – nothing new for months on end.

In South Texas, we have a lot of Hispanic food. It was easy to find guava drinks in the ethnic food isles, but they were loaded with sugar, so I never bought them. I don’t believe that a sugar laden beneficial is really beneficial!

This week I was in the frozen food section of the grocery store buying cherries and blueberries. I saw a new product – Guayaba. Almost the entire label was in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, but I read it marginally well. It appeared that this was guava with no sugar added.

After my bad experience eating edamame hulls, I came home and typed the label into Babel Fish Translator. Sure enough this was guava. “Defrost and it tastes like fresh fruit,” the label said. There were several recipes for drinks. Some of them said to strain the drink after processing it in a blender.

I did a little more Internet research and found that it is ok to eat the skin and seeds of guava. The seeds are hard, so some people discard them, however, in doing so you also discard the sweetest part of the fruit, which is the central pulp around the seeds. Interestingly, the peel has the most phytonutrients.

Yesterday I diced two guavas and mixed them with a banana in my breakfast nuts. It was a delicious combination. The guava was tart, but mixed with the banana, it was perfect. The seeds are definitely hard, but no more annoying than blackberry seeds (I know blackberry is Type O avoid, but I remember what they were like from pre-BTD days.).

It is great to have another frozen beneficial fruit just in time for winter months, when fresh fruit is scarce and high priced. I hope there will be enough demand for the grocery store to continue to carry it.