Huckleberries Health Benefits - The Simple Way To Boost Your Immune System
When doing some hiking, you can see several kinds of berries, like blueberries, blackberries, or even strawberries. But have you ever heard about huckleberries?
Huckleberries health benefits may not be as popular as other berries. But, these dark-bluish small berries can actually act as a highly nutritious food source. Although, there might be some of you wondering about one thing.
“Are huckleberries edible?”
The answer is straight yes! You can eat huckleberries just like how you can eat other common berries. Aside from consuming it raw, sometimes people turn it into jams that are combinable with other ingredients to create a true natural delicacy.
Things or Two About Huckleberries
Before talking about huckleberries health benefits, let us be closer with these huckleberries. The physical appearance of huckleberries isn’t too far away from its family, blueberries. It looks almost identical, however. There are some changes that are noticeable once you open the berry. The seeds are a bit bigger, and this changes the texture.
Huckleberry shrub is a part of the Ericaceae family plan, and there are two genera of huckleberries that are safe to consume: Vaccinium and Gaylussacia.
What’s best about huckleberries is that they can grow in any climate. It has very high survivability to grow in many parts of the world. No wonder you can easily see some huckleberries in Montana, the Andes, and even southern Brazil.
Besides the berries, you can also benefit from the leaves. In fact, there are some notable Huckleberry leaves benefits that may be useful to your body, including providing a good amount of antioxidants and helping to lower blood sugar.
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Nutritional Content
Luckily, huckleberries can be an alternative to other popular berries since it also contains lots of useful nutrition, like Vitamins A, B, and C, plus a large number of antioxidants. It also has a high phytochemical content, as shown by some studies, and some types of antioxidants, including polyphenols and anthocyanin.
Similar to the good amount of antioxidants that you may take as one of the health benefits of curcumin, the content is enough to make you fresher while boosting your immunity system.
One study shows that huckleberries contain about 15 different anthocyanins. Included on the list are glucoside, galactoside, petunidin, peonidin, and Malvidin.
Usually, you can see the potential amount of antioxidants in their color. The darker, the better. If you notice some shrubs with darker huckleberries, don’t be shy to pick them. The lighter ones are fine, but they taste a little bit different from the ripe ones.
Within these dark-colored huckleberries, there’s another type of compound, pterostilbene. It’s actually one of the antioxidants that may help to remove free radical damage. You can also find the same compound on the other dark-colored berries as well! Some of them are blueberry, cranberry, and lingonberry.
On these berries, other nutritional compounds like fibers, sugar, organic acids, and other phenolic properties are present. These compounds also highly support the huckleberries health benefits.
Per 100 grams serving of huckleberries, there are 37 calories, 0.4 grams of protein, 9.7 grams of carbs, and 0.1 grams of protein. Also, don’t forget those nice Vitamins and calcium that are useful to boost your health!
How Does It Taste Like?
Despite the similarities in physical appearance, what do huckleberries taste like?
As you may expect, huckleberries taste the same as blueberries. It has a kind of tart taste but is also sweet. The combination of huckleberries' unique taste is nice and refreshing.
Huckleberries Health Benefits
In the old days, early Native American settlers were using huckleberries as a supplementary food and had additional benefits through huckleberry medicinal uses. Although small in size, these berries are quite useful to be a potent remedy for serious illnesses, including cardiac diseases, inflammation, and terrible infections.
See more about the huckleberry health benefits:
1. Contains High Antioxidants
Seeing the ORAC score, which measures and indicators the concentration of the antioxidants inside a food, huckleberries and other berries within Vaccinium family are the highest sources of antioxidants. With this many antioxidants, you may obtain several advantages that are similar to the health benefits of pomegranate juice.
Foods that are high in antioxidants are really beneficial for maintaining healthy skin, reducing stress, and acting as an anti-acne remedy. If you want to keep yourself healthy, consuming a regular amount of huckleberries is the way to go.
2. Good for Cardiac Health
The second one on the list of huckleberries health benefits is highly related to their polyphenol content. Any fruits or vegetables that have a high amount of polyphenols are considered really healthy for cardiac health.
Huckleberries are also beneficial in reducing the symptoms of critical diseases, including high cholesterol levels, increasing inflammation, or irregular blood pressure.
To be healthy and free from chronic diseases, you need to schedule a regular consumption of huckleberries. Besides eating them fresh, you can also combine them with warm water to have the good benefits of huckleberry tea.
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3. Boost Immune System
Aside from the polyphenols and antioxidants, one thing that’s present in huckleberries in such a high amount is Vitamin C.
Vitamin C may help in the process of collagen protein production. When your body has enough collagen, your immune system will also be supported and improved.
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4. One of The Best Foods for Hair and Skin
Still related to the benefits above, collagen is also one compound that’s most popular in skincare production. Thus, consuming huckleberries can make your skin more treated. It’s actually one of the easiest ways to maintain your skin health without buying too much stuff.
You don’t even need to buy skincare anymore once you are used to consuming healthy foods, including huckleberries.
5. Has a Good Nutritional Content for Better Metabolism
That’s the reason why you need to consume berries, such as these huckleberries, if you have health problems or symptoms related to anemia. Rather than consuming medical drugs, it’s always better to consume healthy foods beforehand.
Ways to Process Huckleberries
Similar to the health benefits of apple juice, you can eat huckleberries raw, preserve or process them into something else. The most popular way to process huckleberries is turning them into jam, pie, and toppings for cookies to gain the huckleberries health benefits in such a fun and pleasant way.
You can also use them to be the additional ingredients for oatmeal, cakes, and muffins. The similarities with blueberries make huckleberries dependable alternatives.
With its refreshing and sweet taste, one can simply turn it into nice and delicious ice cream for the hottest days.
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