Health Benefits of Plums in the Mediterranean Diet

Plums are no strangers to the traditional Mediterranean diet. Spiced plums cooked with sugar, cinnamon, and cloves is a French specialty, served chilled. Many types of plums are available in the United States, including the juicy Japanese plums perfect for snacking and the drier European plums best suited for cooking. Plums are available from May through October.

Plums range in color from yellow to blue-black, with every shade of red, purple, and blue in between. Plums are best when tree-ripened, but because plums soften (without developing additional sweetness) after picking, ripe and unripe plums can both feel soft and ripe in the store. If your market allows it, you will be better off taste-testing the store’s plums before buying. Plums are a nutritious and complexly flavored dessert.

Let us not forget plums in their dried form! Super-nutritious prunes have a reputation for promoting regularity, but they do far more than provide fiber for our bodies. Prunes are a concentrated source of many vitamins and minerals, and have high levels of caffeic and ferulic acid, phenolic acids demonstrated to have potent anticancer effects in animal studies