This Salad Vegetable Has 5 Times the Vitamin C as Oranges

By Jeffrey Green

Vitamin C is crucial to our health on multiple levels. It has even shown to have strong anti-cancer properties. Yet most Americans don’t get enough from their diet or supplements, according to a recent study.

These days it’s difficult to trust off-the-self supplements. Almost all chewable vitamins now have sucralose (artificial sweetener) in them. So it’s best to get as much of your essential vitamins as possible through your food.

Quick: name five foods that are high in Vitamin C. Don’t cheat by Googling it. Your mental list probably starts and ends with citrus fruits or dark leafy greens. Well, there’s one common salad item that you may be overlooking that blows them all away.

I called it a vegetable in the title but it’s technically a fruit. I’m talking about sweet or bell peppers. Bell peppers are super rich in Vitamin C with yellow varieties packing nearly five times the amount contained in oranges.

Image credit: Luc Viatour

One yellow sweet pepper contains 341 milligrams of Vitamin C, or about 569% of recommended daily intake. In contrast one orange has 69.7 milligrams, or around 116% of daily recommendations.

Even green and red sweet peppers outperform oranges coming in at 220% and 349% in daily value, respectively.

Peppers also have significantly less sugar than citrus fruits making them a healthier option for getting your Vitamin C.

So what are you waiting for? Get some seeds and plant them this Spring. Use them in salads, salsa, fajitas, over your steaks, in your omelets and in anything else that tastes awesome.

Stats source: Healthaliciousness
Salad image: National Cancer Institute