Health benefits of caraway seeds

■ In addition to its use as medicinal values, caraway indeed has many health benefiting nutrients, minerals, vitamins and anti-oxidants.

■ Caraway seeds are rich source of dietary fiber. 100 g seeds provide 38 g of fiber. They increase bulk of the food and helps prevent constipation by speeding up movement of food through the gut. In fact, gastro-intestinal transit time of food is greatly decreased.

■ Fiber also binds to toxins in the food and helps protect the colon mucus membrane from cancers. In addition, dietary fibers bind to bile salts (produced from cholesterol) and decrease their re-absorption in colon, thus help lower serum LDL cholesterol levels.

■ Caraway has many health benefiting essential oils. Principle volatile compounds are carvone, limonene, carveol, pinen, cumuninic aldehyde, furfurol,and thujone. These active principles in the caraway seeds are known to have antioxidant, digestive, carminative and anti-flatulent properties.

■ Caraway has many many health benefiting flavonoid anti-oxidnats such as lutein, carotene, crypto-xanthin and zeaxanthin. These compounds are indeed function as powerful anti-oxidants by removing harmful free radicals from the body thus protect from cancers, infection, aging and degenerative neurological diseases.

■ Caraway spice is an excellent source of minerals like iron, copper, calcium, potassium, manganese, selenium, zinc and magnesium. Copper is required in the production of red blood cells. Iron is required for red blood cell formation. zinc is a co-factor in many enzymes that regulate growth and development, sperm generation, digestion and nucleic acid synthesis. Potassium in an important component of cell and body fluids that helps controlling heart rate and blood pressure. Manganese is used by the body as a co-factor for the powerful anti-oxidant enzyme superoxide dismutase.

■ The seeds indeed are storehouse for many vital vitamins. Vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin C as well as many B-complex vitamins like thiamin, pyridoxine, riboflavin and niacin particularly are concentrated in the caraway seeds.


Source: nutrition-and-you.com