Skip to main content

Gooseberries--a Low-Carb Fruit

Amish Red gooseberries from my garden.

First, the tiny gooseberry plants that arrived in the mail were too small to bear fruit. Then the neighbors' lawn guy cut them down while mowing drunk in the dark. But finally, after putting some bricks around them (and not doing much else), I have a crop of tasty gooseberries. 

Gooseberries are juicy, a little tart, and they last longer than other berries. They're like seedless grapes but less sweet with only about 7 grams of net carbohydrate per cup, 42 mg of vitamin C and 297 mg of potassium.

If you've never heard of them, you're not alone (and you're probably not English). Gooseberry bushes were banned in the United States for a long time because they were a host plant for a disease that killed white pines. They're still banned in some places. But they're allowed where I live (we don't have many pines in Indiana) and they've grown like champs on the north side of my house. 

Comments

Yes, Gooseberries are a low carb fruit and are high in vitamin C, vitamin A, Potassium and Magnesium. In the UK these tangy berries are only available for a short time.
Green, are the early season gooseberries and have a tart flavour and are usually used for cooking, while later, red-tinged fruits are sweeter and milder.

I can remember growing up my dear mum used to made wonderful gooseberry pies and crumbles ...

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
I've never had a gooseberry dessert. I should try making one.

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...