Just go ahead and forget everything you’ve ever heard about canned fruit being bad for you. Because turns out, it’s all lies — at least when it comes to peaches. That’s right, Mom, a new study of peaches’ nutritional value found that canned peaches are just as healthy as fresh ones. In fact (wait for it) it turns out that sticking fresh peaches in a can and letting them marinate for awhile actually improves their nutritional value.
The Journal of Sciences and Agriculture published the peach-focused research findings, and they pretty much blow fresh peaches out of the water. Canned peaches (yes, the kind you find in your local supermarket) had four times as much Vitamin C as their fresh counterparts, plus comparable levels of Vitamin E and a ton more folate than fresh peaches.
There are a couple of things to pay attention to before you swear off of fresh peaches forever, though. First, the nutritional benefits only apply to peaches that are canned in water — when they’re canned in syrup, the sugar levels go way up and undo all those nice health benefits. Second (and more sketchy) the study itself was funded by the California cling peach industry. The researchers swear up and down that their research is legit, but we’re going to take it with a grain of salt. Just in case.
