Bananas, Why Not Eat Them?
There are times I find it best to delay eating this delicious fruit
Back in the early 1970s I went to a 3–4 day spiritual retreat camp in upper state New York, close to where the well known Woodstock music festival was held. Having grown up in the Sonoran Desert, I knew about mosquitoes, but I had never experienced them in droves before. Suddenly I felt attacked from everywhere.
Fortunately, the camp cook advised me to stop eating bananas.
I love bananas and often eat this excellent fruit. I eat them by themselves, with yogurt, in fruit salad, and in many other ways. They always give me an energy lift and according to nutritionist Vivian Goldschmidt, MA, they actually are alkaline. The following comes from her website:
…It’s the banana’s most well-known mineral that proves the most powerful bone protector: potassium.
Potassium is an alkalizing mineral, which explains why bananas are an alkalizing food. When the body’s pH balance becomes too acidic, acidosis occurs, and the body responds by rapidly leaching alkalizing minerals from bone to rectify the imbalance. Potassium helps to prevent this by providing the means to balance the pH without eating away at the bone-matrix.
This has special importance to me since I have been diagnosed with osteoporosis. Now I try to follow a more alkaline regimen to aid in remineralizing my bones, God willing.
So why forgo them for the rest of the time that we camp in northern Canada and Alaska?
According to Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health they provide Vitamin B6, fiber, magnesium, C, potassium and manganese. Quoting their website article:
Bananas may even carry the title of the first “superfood…”
The Mayo Clinic’s website also writes about bananas, saying among other things:
From a nutritional standpoint, not many foods measure up to the quality and quantity of nutrients packed inside a banana. A medium-sized banana provides about 105 calories with virtually no fat, cholesterol or sodium.
They then list banana’s impressive health benefits to our:
…blood pressure, fluid balance, heart health plus good nerve and muscle function. A banana can help prevent muscle cramps after exercise.…aid the digestion process by providing prebiotics and probiotics…. [Banana’s] insoluble fiber components help maintain healthy gut bacteria and enzymes needed to digest foods and benefit the immune system.
So why am not going to eat these delicious fruits?
One word:
MOSQUITOES!
“Wait,” you may ask, “what do mosquitoes have to do with bananas?”
Apparently, eating bananas attracts mosquitoes, just as the cook at the camp told me all those years ago. I did a bit of research and found that according to research published by The National Institutes for Health on their PubMed website:
…substantial evidence [exists] in support of folk wisdom regarding bananas and mosquito attraction. Over multiple years and with a subject panel of 75 individuals, we demonstrated that ingestion of bananas… resulted in significantly higher attraction….
Sad though I am at giving up this fruit for much of the rest of the summer, it makes the most sense to me. The choice is a delicious food versus a maddeningly buzzing insect who wants and needs my blood in order to reproduce.
I have the choice of itching or missing a fruit I enjoy. However, for a large portion of the worlds population, mosquitoes are not just an issue of itching — they carry life-threatening diseases.
According to the World Mosquito Program, mosquitoes, transfer diseases from the blood viruses they pick up from diseased animals, including humans. To quote them:
Roughly 390 million people are infected each year with dengue, and hundreds of thousands more are affected by Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.
And there are other mosquito borne diseases like Malaria and West Nile Virus. All of which caused a great deal of human suffering. You can find more information on their website.
So while giving up bananas is a simple way for me to avoid being bitten by those pesky insects, for millions of people it becomes a life and death issue.
Praise God, other than West Nile Virus, most of us living in the United States do not have to be concerned with the mosquito borne diseases.
God mentions mosquitos in the following verse:
GOD does not shy away from citing any kind of allegory…. (Quran 2:26)
Should you be interested, here is a link to another story dealing with mosquitos in the North country:
If you are interested in a health based poem you may enjoy this:
And here is a story from our Covid era:
Wherever you are and whoever you are, I pray you are healthy and happy!
