Do you snack on peaches? Is it for the sake of taste, or do you understand the nutrients found in peaches?
If the taste is your sole motivator, learning about the nutrients in peaches will give you even more reasons to eat them! With peaches, eating healthy while indulging your tastebuds is the best of both worlds!
Keep reading to learn about eleven amazing health benefits of peaches!
Peach Nutrition Facts
From the USDA’s FoodData Central, these are some of the nutritional values of a raw peach in one serving (147g):
- Calories: 68
- Carbohydrates: 14.8g
- Dietary fiber: 2.2g
- Sugar: 12.3g
- Protein: 1.34g
- No cholesterol
- Potassium: 179mg
- Vitamin A: 0.04mg (35.3µg)
- Vitamin C: 6.03mg
- Magnesium: 11.8mg
What are Some Health Benefits of Peaches?
Now that you have an idea of what nutrients are in peaches, let’s go over what benefits they offer.
Peaches Help with Weight Loss
The number of calories in a peach is low, while the fiber intake in a peach is high. With no saturated fats or cholesterol, it’s no wonder this tasty summertime fruit can play a part in losing weight!
Because certain snacks aren’t very filling, it’s easy to overeat them and pack in the calories. Fiber makes you feel full faster and longer, so overeating peaches shouldn’t be an issue.
It’s a win-win situation if you crave something sweet that helps you shed a few pounds.
Peaches Boost Immunity
Eating the skin of a peach is completely optional. Not everybody likes to eat the fuzz on it anyway. However, it should be known that just like the flesh, the skin also boosts your immune system.
Peaches have antioxidants like vitamins A and C, ascorbic acid, zinc, and others that complement your body’s defenses. They can heal your wounds effectively, fight off infections and cell damage, and slow down aging.
Fight and Prevent Cancer
Boosting immunity is essential, especially when trying to prevent serious diseases like cancer. You know the health benefits of peaches are legit if they not only prevent but also fight off this killer!
Peaches have antioxidants like carotenoids, caffeic acid, and polyphenols that inhibit cancer growth and kill cancerous cells.
These cells include free radicals—molecules that contribute to cancer and other disease formations. Avoiding them is tough, but with the antioxidants and nutrients in peaches, you can fight and prevent such illnesses!
Chemotherapy doesn’t need to be the only option to fight cancer. Taking the natural approach with fruits like peaches is better (and easier) than enduring chemo’s side effects.
Peaches Reduce Stress
In Hungary, peaches are considered the “fruit of calmness.” For good reason, too! The magnesium in the peaches reduces your anxiety and improves your sleeping habits.
Stress can interfere with sleep, and anxiety can make everyday tasks difficult to focus on and get done. Try eating a peach slice after some deep breathing or before bedtime.
Peaches Benefit Pregnancy
Ladies, if you’re expecting and you crave peaches, you will not be the only ones benefitting from peach nutrition. Here are a few essential nutrients for mothers and unborn babies.
Vitamin C is one of the most important peach nutrients when carrying a baby. Besides being an antioxidant, vitamin C helps in developing babies’ teeth, muscles, and blood vessels.
Folic acid is another health benefit of peaches during pregnancy, as it prevents neural tube defects in babies. Not only that, it assists in a baby’s spine and brain development.
Crampy? Cranky? Peaches have potassium that suppresses muscle cramps and fatigue. Mothers go through a lot carrying a child, so peaches are a good pick-me-up.
Peaches Promote Digestive Health
Remember how fiber in peaches plays a role in weight loss? It also plays a role in aiding digestion and preventing constipation.
There are two types of fiber in peaches. The insoluble fiber moves food along easily in the gut, loosening what backs up in the gastrointestinal tract.
The soluble fiber feeds the good bacteria in your intestines. It also absorbs water to prolong emptying your stomach and intestines and stabilizes blood sugar levels.
Detoxing Your Body
Detoxing your body is a great health benefit of peaches. These diuretic fruits cleanse your excretory system and your body of toxins thanks to vitamins A, C, and E.
Peach-flavored detox tea makes a great alternative to those nauseating cleansing fluids if you’re on a liquid diet.
Peaches Provide Allergy Relief
Come spring, come fall — come whatever season — allergies will act up and you’ll be reaching for the tissues. It’s all thanks to your body’s histamines.
Histamines are chemicals in your body that cause you to itch, sneeze, and cough to fight off allergens. Seems irritating that chemicals that are supposed to help you make you want to scratch your eyes out, doesn’t it?
Luckily, peaches can prevent histamines from flaring up in your body and reduce allergy symptoms. Instead of grabbing over-the-counter allergy medication, grab a peach for relief.
Peaches Preserve Skin Health
Along with beta carotene, vitamins A and C in peaches protect your skin, not just stave off illnesses. You could consider a peach to be your natural sunscreen since it fights off ultraviolet rays!
Protection against sun exposure isn’t the only thing a peach does for your skin. It also smooths wrinkles, moisturizes skin, lightens dark circles, and takes care of other skin problems.
Not Just for Eating, but Treating
Besides eating peaches, you can also apply the flesh or even the skin to your own skin. When skin creams fail you, look in the pantry or your refrigerator.
One way you can cleanse your skin of blemishes, sun spots, and dead cells is a peach facial mask. A mashed peach and yogurt mixed together can help improve your skin texture.
Peaches Strengthen Your Bones and Teeth
Calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin C are health benefits of peaches that keep your bones strong. They will do the same for your gums and jawbones, which reduces the risk of teeth loss.
In addition, these three minerals also prevent bone diseases like osteoporosis. As for bone loss, potassium in peaches works to prevent that.
Peaches Improve Heart Health
Are you looking to lower your cholesterol and control your blood pressure? Maintain the health of your arteries and care for your heart? Peaches can certainly do that!
Once again, vitamins C and E prove their worth, and that goes for vitamin K as well. These peach nutrients work to widen blood vessels to keep your arteries clear of clots.
The peaches’ potassium also regulates your blood pressure (flushing out excess sodium) and lowers your risk of heart disease. Along with peach magnesium, peach potassium also maintains your heart rate.
Your heart will thank you for adding peaches to your diet. Could it really be a coincidence that the shape of a peach resembles a heart?
Peaches Prevent Brain Disorders
Peaches are an example of brain food. They contain folate that helps your brain function as it’s supposed to by improving memory, concentration, thought process — the works!
It’s been said that peaches’ magnesium works to reduce anxiety and stress. The kind of stress that’s especially imperative to protect against is oxidative stress.
Oxidative stress has been shown to be linked to certain diseases like Alzheimer’s. Since peach nutrients and antioxidants combat that stress, eating them is a preventive measure against diseases associated with oxidative stress.
Adverse Effects From Too Many Peaches
As with most foods, too much of a good thing can be bad. The health benefits of peaches are there, but so are the health risks if you eat too many of them.
Here are a few consequences of overdoing peach nutrition.
Too Many Antioxidants
You’ve read that antioxidants help your immune system. Too many antioxidants, however, will put you at risk of heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers.
If you already have cancer, you could actually. worsen your condition. There’s evidence to suggest that high levels of antioxidants can cause certain cancer cells to spread.
Too Much Fiber
If you recall, studies have shown that fiber makes you full longer. There’s a reason for that.
Fiber doesn’t fully digest after consumption. Peaches with as little as 2.3g of fiber help move food through your digestive tract.
Eating too many high-fiber foods will upset your stomach and gastrointestinal tract. Instead of providing relief for abdominal problems like constipation, diarrhea, bloating, and others, high amounts of fiber will only worsen those problems.
Too Much Potassium
It’s true that the potassium in peaches lowers high blood pressure. However, too much potassium in your diet will lower your blood pressure dangerously, leading to hypotension.
Hyperkalemia is another risk of consuming too much potassium. Its symptoms involve heart palpitations, chest pain, trouble breathing, and, in severe cases, paralysis.
These conditions warrant a call to the doctor. But you can easily avoid this scenario by not overeating peaches.
Allergy Warning
This isn’t really a case of eating too many peaches, but you should be aware there are adverse effects regarding allergies. Though peaches fight off allergy symptoms, keep in mind that they can also become an allergen.
If you have a birch pollen allergy, you could develop a peach allergy. That’s because the protein in peaches is similar to the pollen allergen.
A few symptoms of a peach allergy include:
- Hives
- Swelling of the lips, tongue, or throat
- Congestion
- Abdominal pain
Talk to your doctor if you experience these symptoms after eating a peach. Peach nutrition isn’t the only thing to keep you healthy, so if it turns out that you’re allergic, there are other fruits you can still have.
Adding Peaches to Your Diet
Selecting and Storing Your Peaches
Would you like to enjoy the amazing health benefits of peaches if your own diet? If so, visit the produce department on your next grocery run. Check to see if their peaches are ripe by noting the color and smell and by lightly squeezing them.
There are many ways you can store your peaches, ripe or unripe. The more peaches you have for use after peach season has ended, the longer you’ll extend their health benefits throughout the year.
Regarding Peach Seeds
The flesh and skin of peaches have a lot of nutritional benefits. But you may be wondering if that includes the seeds.
Because peach flesh surrounds a stone (or pit) with a seed inside, they’re considered stone fruits. That’s how they have the names freestone (easy to remove the stone) or clingstone (hard to remove the stone).
The health benefits of peach seeds are no different from those of the nutrients in peaches. However, just like with peaches, avoid eating too many seeds.
Though the seeds have a trace amount of hydrogen cyanide, eating a small number of them won’t hurt you. If you cook the seeds, though, the cyanide is no longer a threat.
Ideas and Recipes for Eating Peaches
Peaches are best eaten in the morning to assist in certain bodily functions. So if you enjoy bananas with your breakfast cereal, try using peach slices instead.
Do you eat yogurt? Try topping it with peach bits and slices.
Asked to bring a dessert to a family gathering? Save a piece of peach cobbler for yourself before everyone else digs in!
You can also try some of these peach recipes on our website for fun ways to use the fruit in your meals:
Relish the Health Benefits of Peaches!
You can never go wrong eating something sweet while also improving your health! Take full advantage of these amazing health benefits as you sink your teeth into the sweet, juicy goodness of peaches!
Excited for more peach content? Check out my peaches page for growing tips, info guides, recipes, and more!
