The New Kid on the Block: Grapefruit, the Forbidden Fruit

By Uncle Paul

Today I would like to take you on a journey back in time some 300 years to find the origin of a relatively new fruit. We will travel southeast to the very tip of Florida and catch a sailing ship to a beautiful pear-shaped island. Today, the island people here have a warm, sophisticated nature, take tea every afternoon, and dress for dinner. The game of cricket is both a national pastime and a passion.

The island has craggy volcanic cliffs on the east and broad, seemingly endless sandy beaches on the west. Picturesque coves make up a coastline of turquoise-colored water. This incredible island paradise is called Os Barbados, or “The Bearded Ones.” In 1536, Pedro Campos, a Portuguese explorer, named the island for its fig trees, which have long-hanging aerial roots that resemble beards.

In 1750, the Rev. Griffith Hughes came upon the grapefruit on Barbados and called it “forbidden fruit” because he and his companions were looking for the origin of the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. This name stuck for years.

Today we know this relatively new and intriguing fruit as the delightful grapefruit. All other citrus fruits originated in the Old World.

At first the grapefruit was thought to be a descendant of the pummelo, but now it is believed the grapefruit is a hybrid between the pummelo and the orange. By the latter part of the 1800s, grapefruit trees were beginning to show up in places like Southern Texas, where it had been thought too cold for citrus plants to survive.

As the story goes, one very determined grapefruit tree froze during a particularly cold Texas winter but survived and produced fruit. After freezing through many winters, the tree showed itself to be a survivor.

By 1893, the air of the Texas Rio Grande Valley began smelling sweet with the lingering scent of citrus blossoms, and this is where the ruby red variety was born. At first growers only planted white grapefruit in this valley, but in the 1920s they began finding red grapefruit growing on the white trees. They started grafting these mutation branches to develop the ruby red. By 1962, Texas was growing only the red varieties because they could withstand the cold better and tasted sweeter.

We owe the popularity of the grapefruit in America to the stock market crash of 1929. During the Great Depression, you could obtain grapefruit free with food stamps from the welfare board. Families encountering the fruit for the first time didn’t know if they were supposed to cook it or eat it raw. The welfare board received a lot of complaints from the families that had cooked the grapefruit for several hours and still found it too tough to eat. By the 1940s the fruit had caught on, and people were using a serrated spoon to eat half a grapefruit with their breakfast.

“Grapefruit packs in lots of nutritional goodies, supplying a heaping dose of vitamin C, folic acid, and potassium, all of which protect your heart,” says Dr. Barry Sears in his book, The Top 100 Zone Foods. “Pink grapefruit is relatively rich in anti-oxidants, and ruby red grapefruit provides an added bonus: lycopene, the phytochemical that helps prevent the ‘bad’ (LDL) cholesterol from oxidizing and damaging artery walls.”

Grapefruit also contains pectin, a form of soluble fiber that has been shown in animal studies to slow down the progression of atherosclerosis. Drinking three six-ounce glasses of grapefruit juice a day was shown to reduce the activity of an enzyme that activates cancer-causing chemicals found in tobacco smoke. In rats whose colons were injected with carcinogens, grapefruit and its isolated active compounds (apigenin, hesperidin, limonin, naringin, naringenin, nobiletin) increased the death of cancer cells. There is a medical warning: Some medications interact with grapefruit and grapefruit juice, so you should ask your doctor or pharmacist about grapefruit interactions with your medications.

Ken Fujioka, MD, led a study on the infamous “Grapefruit Diet.” He reported that after 12 weeks, on average, participants who ate half a grapefruit with each meal lost 3.6 lbs, those who drank a serving of grapefruit juice three times a day lost 3.3 lbs, and some people lost up to 10 lbs.

Studies show the most important active ingredient in grapefruit that helps people lose weight is naringin, a flavonoid compound that gives grapefruit its characteristic bitter flavor and blocks the uptake of fatty acids into cells to prevent our bodies from effectively using carbohydrates.

So pick the new kid on the block, the heavier the better, and enjoy the sweet, yet tart, delicious flavor of the ruby red grapefruit.

Uncle Paul, along with his wife Calla, owns Uncle Paul’s European Style Open Air Produce Market, 2310 SE Hawthorne, 503-484-8612 or visit www.unclepaulsproduce.com