My parents came to stay a few weeks ago, bearing bags of kiwifruit from their orchard. “We’ve got so much!” my mum exclaimed as she dumped three or four bulging bags in the front hall. “The fruit shops at home are giving them away.” Her face became more serious, “And the pack house want to pay us to mulch our kiwifruit into the ground. There’s so much around that it’s cheaper to mulch the poorer quality fruit than pick and pack it. They say the orchard manager hasn’t been doing his job properly and the kiwifruit just don’t last well for export. A week later a fierce hail-storm decimated heaps of kiwfruit orchards around Tauranga and Te Puke – an economic disaster for those poor orchardists. Mum phoned me: “They have lost so many orchards that now they want our fruit”.” It was a bitter-sweet moment.

Kiwifruit has been in my mouth and on my mind a lot lately. Green and gold varieties fill my fruit bowl and every day we eat them with breakfast, as snacks, in the lunch-box, and after dinner. Most children I know prefer the gold variety. It has less of that puckered mouth zing to it and they love its sweet flavour and bright colour. If any Kiwi family isn’t eating kiwifruit at the moment they are missing out on a cheap and incredibly healthy food. And because now is kiwifruit season it’s most likely that we are getting the optimum amounts of all the nutritional goodies they contain.

Kiwifruit is one of the most nutrient dense fruits around. That’s why it’s been called a ‘super-fruit’. It’s packed with vitamin C, and the gold ones are also rich in vitamin E. But that’s not all: it has plenty of other phyto (plant) chemicals, especially carotenoids which cause the gorgeous green and gold colours and protect our precious DNA from damaging oxidation.

As kiwifruit ripen, their cell walls (that’s the fibre) swell to three or four times their unripe size. It’s sort of like a sponge full of water and it’s sure to help swish things through. In 2002 around 40 people aged over 60 ate two or three green kiwifruit a day for three weeks to see if it would reduce constipation – a common problem in older people. The study really just confirmed what anyone who’s pigged out on kiwifruit knows: you end up on the toilet and there is definitely no straining!

Both green and gold have plenty of fibre but the green also has an enzyme that stimulates gut motility. Leave some green kiwifruit on your steak for a while and it will soon be as though you had clobbered it with a meat mallet! It’s the same enzyme: it tenderises meat and it gently gets your gut moving.

Green kiwifruit also have lots of fructo-oligosaccharides – called FOS’s for short. These act as a pre-biotic which means they are food for the good bugs already in your gut. It’s sort of like ‘grow-your-own’ bacteria!

I recently chatted to Vital Foods – a New Zealand company that has worked out how to put pure kiwifruit pulp into a pill. It’s sold in chemists as a supplement for gut health, and the studies they have conducted on it have had good results. They have even managed to extract the oil from kiwifruit seeds. Just like flaxseed oil, it’s rich in alpha-linolenic acid which converts to omega-3 fats in the body. Vital Foods say that kiwifruit oil is 65% ALA compared with flaxseed oil’s 55% but there’s just one problem – they can only produce a small amount.

So if you don’t like kiwifruit or think you need a concentrated dose of it, you can try the supplement – Phloe (Info and Reuters 2008 press release here).

Me? I’m off to the fruit shop – Bye!