The Taste And Health Benefits Of Dragon Fruit Or Pink Pitaya

Sporting a hot pink appearance and growing with spiky green leaves shooting up like flames around it, the dragon fruit screams for attention! This tropical treat grows on a variety of cacti and when you cut one open, you find an edible pink or white flesh speckled with small black seeds inside.

What Does Dragon Fruit Taste Like?

This unique superfruit has a naturally subtle, sweet taste, and slightly crunchy texture. It’s also sometimes called “pink pitaya” or “pitahaya”, and can be referred to as a “strawberry pear”—thanks to its delightful mix of flavors that come across as a natural taste of pear, kiwi, and watermelon.

This colorful delight has become popular among foodies, the health-conscious, and anyone looking for a spectacularly bright recipe post to liven up their social feed.

Our Dragon Berry mix is the perfect easy add-in ingredient for smoothies, shakes, and baked goods.

Tasty flavors of Dragon Fruit (Pink Pitaya), Strawberry, and Blueberry combine to provide a berrylicious ingredient perfect for colorful and nutritious creativity.

Grab your own bag here!

Healthy Reasons To Enjoy Dragon Fruit

Besides tasting delicious, dragon fruit offers some pretty powerful boosts to our bodies! This brilliant treat for your taste buds is low in calories, yet loaded with essential vitamins and minerals. Some of these include:

• Calcium
• Magnesium
• Iron
• Vitamin C
• Vitamin E
• Fiber
• Polyphenols
• Carotenoids
• Betacyanins

Micronutrients from plant-based ingredients extend benefits to our health in many ways. Dragon fruit contains several types of potent antioxidants, which may help fight off chronic disease. (Antioxidants work best when eaten naturally in food, rather than taken in pill form). (1)

As just one example, the antioxidant compounds, like the betacyanins in dragon fruit, are compounds that aid in neutralizing free radicals in the body. (2) Plus freeze drying concentrates the antioxidant amount per serving, which is why we include this fruit in our Dragon Berry mix.

This means helping protect your cells from damage, so they can better aid in warding off a variety of conditions—from premature aging to cancer. Antioxidants also can be helpful with efforts to bring down or prevent inflammation. This would include forms of arthritis and gout.

Happy Insides

Besides more than 400 species of bacteria, your gut is also home to about 100 trillion diverse microorganisms. (That’s 100 with 12 additional zeroes at the end!) (3) All that bacteria can be a good thing—as it plays a pivotal role in gastrointestinal health—and by maintaining a healthy gut biome, the entire body and its systems greatly benefit.

Dragon fruit is also packed full of necessary fiber. Although fiber is often recognized for its role in digestion and its ability to “keep you regular”, it may also play a role in protecting against heart disease, managing diabetes, and maintaining a healthy body weight.

The prebiotics contained in this marvelous fruit feed the healthy probiotics that are found in the gut. Dragon fruit encourages the growth particularly of the probiotics lactobacilli and bifidobacteria, which are helpful bacteria that can kill disease-causing viruses, help enhance digestion, lower risk of intestinal infections, and assist in overall internal balance. (4)(5)(6)

Small, But Mighty

Don’t forget those little black seeds sheltered within the dragon fruit. Thanks to their natural oils and fatty acids—omega-3 and omega-9—doctor’s consider these to be heart healthy!

This intensely bright tropical fruit may offer some vivid immune system boosting properties as well. We know that the quality of what we put into our bodies greatly determines their ability to fight infections.

The immune system’s white blood cells attack and destroy harmful substances. This is what a healthy body does when it’s exposed to a threat. You come in contact with a cold or flu virus and your germ-fighting army of white blood cells launches into action. Unfortunately, white blood cells are quite sensitive to damage by free radicals.

This is where dragon fruit comes in—the carotenoids and vitamins, like the vitamin C it contains, can neutralize free radicals and help to defend white blood cells against harm. (7)

Many vitamins and minerals work better together rather than alone. Take vitamin C and iron as a case in point. One of the important roles iron plays is in the transporting of oxygen through the body. Yet sadly, so many people run deficient in iron that it’s been said to be the most common nutrient deficiency worldwide.

Dragon fruit is actually one of few fresh fruits that contain iron, and to make it even better, the vitamin C it also holds may improve your body’s absorption of this important mineral. All of these crucial vitamins and minerals in pitaya can assist the immune system in staying alert and well.

Time To Give It Taste!

If you’ve already tried it, you probably love it, and have your go-to favorite recipes that show off this stunning superfruit. And if you’ve haven’t tasted dragon fruit yet, it’s time to—right away!

While the leathery skin can be intimidating and slicing one up may seem like too much of a sticky process, our Dragon Berry powder allows you to enjoy this incredible fruit year-round, with no mess and total convenience. Plus the addition of blueberry and strawberry in our Dragon Berry mix makes it even more nutritious and flavorful.

Simply add a nutritious scoop to your next smoothie, sprinkle some on top of a bowl of granola, blend a bit into icing for a gorgeous natural cake coloring, or rim a glass for your next cocktail.

Let us know your favorite ways to use this impressive tropical fruit blend that’s full of nutrition. We’d love to hear from you—and you might just be featured on our website! Contact us here or tag us on Instagram @terrapowders. Post yourself using our powders with #cleanfoodpower.