Health conscious but time poor? Grab a pack of packaged ready-to-eat fruit and your body will be none the wiser.

That’s the message from new international research showing that chilled, ready-to-eat, fresh-cut fruit retains high levels of vitamin C and other antioxidants.

Cutting and packaging fruit has almost no effect on the main antioxidants, scientists report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

In fact, levels of some antioxidants increased in selected fruits.

Researchers including those from the University of California, Davis, took pineapples, watermelon, rockmelon, strawberries, mangoes and kiwifruits and processed half as fresh-cut and left half whole.

Both lots of fruit were refrigerated under identical conditions for nine days before being tested for nutrient content.

Tests revealed only small losses of antioxidant compounds in the cut fruit compared to fruit left whole.
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With spring on the way, Harvard researchers advise men to get more sun, supplements, and seafood. All are good sources of vitamin D, and a large, lengthy study suggests the vitamin reduces risk of prostate cancer.

About 240,000 men in the United States alone will be told that they have the cancer this year, and around 30,000 of those with the disease will die from it. An 18-year Harvard investigation of 14,916 medical doctors found that 1,066 developed the cancer, and 496 of them suffered a deadly form of it. The researchers say that such tolls can be reduced with the help of vitamin D.

“Our study found that more than two-thirds of the men involved had insufficient vitamin D levels in winter and spring,” says Haojie Li, an instructor at the Harvard Medical School. “Even in the sunnier summer and fall months, more than 10 percent were vitamin D deficient, and more than half had less than optimum amounts of the vitamin in their blood.”

Men (and women) usually can get enough of the vitamin with a balanced diet and modest exposure to summer sunshine. Those who don’t eat fish and dairy foods, spend most of their time indoors, and live in foggy northern climates often fail to get enough D, especially in winter. Over many years, a deficiency may lead to softening of the bones. On the other hand, too much exposure to the sun raises the risk of skin cancer.
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