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Health

This Delicious Tropical Fruit Can Help Fight Wrinkles, Protect Vision, and Boost Gut Health

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Native to southeast Asia, there are hundreds of different types of mangos, each with distinct colors and tastes. You’re probably most familiar with the ones with red and green or orange skin, and a sweet, juicy, bright orange flesh on the inside. Like most of mother natures’ other delicious tropical fruits, mangos boast some serious health benefits. It’s not for nothing that some cultures have called it “king of the fruits!”

Mango Benefits For Your Health

Taking good care of your gut is essential for so many reasons, and eating mangos may help you do it. The combination of water and soluble fiber in mangos supports healthy elimination. Soluble fiber absorbs water and turns into a gel in the colon, helping to move waste through more efficiently — woohoo for healthy poops! Mangos also contain digestive enzymes called amylases which aid the break down of food in our digestive tracts, allowing us to better absorb nutrients from them. Pretty impressive!

On top of boosting your belly, mangos also contain polyphenols (like mangiferin) that lower inflammation and fight oxidative stress. When harmful free radicals are present in the body, our risk for serious health conditions rises. Getting more polyphenols from our diets can help mitigate some of this free-radical damage, and those in mangos have been found to be especially powerful. Some studies have shown that mango polyphenols reduced free radical damage and destroyed colon, lung, and breast cancer cells.

Two specific antioxidants in mangos — lutein and zeaxanthin — work together to support healthy vision. These compounds accumulate inside the retina of the eye, absorbing excess light and protecting it from damage. And since mangos are also a good source of vitamin A — another vision-boosting nutrient — your peepers will certainly thank you if you start eating more mangos.

If that weren’t enough to sell these delicious beauties, mangos can improve our hair and skin, too! They’re high in vitamin C, which is a powerful antioxidant that fights free radical damage to our skin cells. It’s also a precursor to collagen, the protein that gives skin its structure and firmness. Getting more vitamin C in your diet can help you fight off signs of aging like sagging and wrinkling. The vitamin A in mangos can also help protect your skin from sun damage, and even encourage hair growth by increasing sebum (or oil) production on the scalp. All that in one fruit!

Mangos are super delicious and easy to add to your daily routine. You can eat it plain or slice some mango and add it to a salad. I like to toss some frozen mango chunks into smoothie recipes during the summer, check out one of my favorite tropical summer smoothie recipes, here!

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