“With a cheery on top” – is a popular saying because everyone loves cherries. This fresh, delicious fruit is sweet and perfectly healthy.
So, are you wondering, are cherries healthy? Are cherries bad for you? Do not worry if you love cherries because they are absolutely healthy.
Cherries contain a lot of healthy nutrients like antioxidants and vitamin C. So, science says that cherries can help protect your heart, improve sleep, and lower inflammation.
Depending on the variety of cherries, how often you eat them, and how many you eat, there are a lot of health benefits of cherries.
Read the rest of the article to know cherries benefits and side effects, cherry benefits for blood, cherry benefits for males and females, and more.
Cherry Nutrients
These smaller stone fruits are sweet and tart and contain a lot of nutrients. Let us see what the nutrients are in a cup of raw, sweet, and pitted cherries.
- 97 calories
- 3.23 grams of fiber
- 32.3 milligrams of phosphorus
- 342 milligrams of potassium
- 3.23 micrograms of vitamin K
- 10.8 milligrams of vitamin C
- 24.7 grams of carbohydrate
- 20 milligrams of calcium
- 16.9 milligrams of magnesium
Health Benefits of Cherries
Cherries have a lot of health benefits. Let us explore those benefits down below.
Anti-Inflammatory Compounds and Antioxidants
The plant compounds found in cherries are what make them so beneficial to our health.
Even though the type and amount of these compounds vary from variety to variety, cherries of all kinds have a lot of anti-inflammatory compounds and antioxidants.
The benefits of cherries for skin relate to these compounds and antioxidants. These also help fight oxidative stress, which is linked to premature aging and a variety of chronic diseases.
On review even found that if you eat cherries, it reduces inflammation and oxidative stress markers in a lot of studies.
Cherries are rich in polyphenols, which can help combat cellular damage, promote your overall health, and reduce inflammation.
Exercise Recovery
Are cherries good for weight loss? Yes, as cherries are high in fiber content, they can make you feel fuller and help with weight loss.
Are frozen cherries healthy? Yes, even though they are frozen, they are packed with nutrients that are beneficial to your health.
Cherries help with the aftereffect of exercise, including damage, muscle soreness, and inflammation. Tart cherries are much more effective in this area.
The juice of tart cherries helps with muscle recovery, reduces the pain of muscle caused by exercise, and even prevents the loss of strength in athletes.
Moreover, research shows that they enhance the performance in exercise.
A study with 27 endurance runners showed that they had faster race times and even experienced lesser muscle pain who had cherries rather than those who had a placebo.
Heart Disease
A lot of studies show that having cherries can keep your heart healthy because of the polyphenol antioxidants and potassium that cherries contain. Sweet varieties can help with risk factors for the heart.
In a cup of cherries, there are 342 milligrams of potassium, which is a mineral that is essential to keep your heart healthy. You can have dried cherries or cherry powder.
This mineral is important to keep a regular heartbeat and remove the extra sodium from the body, which regulates blood pressure giving you lower blood pressure and blood glucose, making it good for diabetic women.
If you have enough potassium in your body, it may as well reduce the risk of stroke and heart disease.
Cherries are also rich in polyphenol antioxidants such as catechins, flavanols, and anthocyanins, which are essential to keep a healthy heart by reducing inflammation and also protecting the heart from cellular damage.
Protects from Gout and Arthritis
Cherry juice help with gout and arthritis-related joint pain along with other health conditions because of its anti-inflammatory properties.
A lot of studies show that this fruit can help prevent oxidative stress and even decrease inflammation because it suppresses inflammatory proteins, which leads to the reduction of arthritis symptoms.
Eating fresh cherries can reduce the levels of uric acid in your body, which is beneficial for those people who have gout because of their levels of uric acid.
A study with ten women shows eating sweet cherry juice lowers the inflammatory marker levels of C-reactive protein and decreases the levels of uric acid as well. This is what consuming cherries help you with.
Another study with 633 people who had gout showed that eating cherries made them have fewer recurrent gout attacks.
Moreover, this study also showed that eating cherries combined with the medication for gout reduced the gout attacks to 75 percent less.
Improves the Quality of Sleep
If you eat or even drink the juice of tart cherries, it can improve your sleep quality.
Because of the high plant compound concentration of this fruit, you may face an improvement in your sleep quality.
Moreover, cherry juice has a substance known as melatonin, which is what regulates the sleep-wake cycle. So, do not stop drinking cherry juice.
A study with 20 people shows drinking tart cherry juice for a week can increase the levels of melatonin in their body, sleep quality, and sleep duration. This is what cherry consumption can help you with.
Again, a 2-week study with older insomniac patients showed that if they drank the juice of tart cherries, their sleep time increased by 84 minutes.
Side Effects of Cherries
How many cherries should you eat a day? You should consume cherries in moderation. So, you should eat 25 of them if they are the sweet ones and about 100 of them if there are tart cherries.
There are some side effects of eating cherries, but not many. It is essential to check with wellness professionals if you suffer from pain after eating cherries.
As high-FODMAP fruits, some people might suffer from IBS or irritable bowel syndrome if they are sensitive to cherries because it contains a lot of sugar called sorbitol and fructose.
If you keep a food diary and record the symptoms, you may get to the root of what is causing you distress.
And, if cherries are the reason that you are suffering from any kind of distress, you should immediately eliminate them from your diet.
