A healthy diet includes about nine daily servings of fruits and vegetables. Eating raisins allows you to boost your daily fruit intake, making for a healthy snack or an addition to sandwiches or salads. Raisins contain several beneficial nutrients that support your health, but their calorie-dense nature means they should be consumed in moderation to avoid weight gain.
Raisins are a source of macronutrients, the nutrients that make up the majority of your diet. Consuming raisins supplies your body with varying amounts of all three macronutrients: a 1-ounce serving contains 0.9 grams of protein, 0.1 grams of fat and 22.5 grams of carbohydrates. Of those 22.5 grams, approximately 17 come from sugar, while 1 gram comes from dietary fiber. Consuming sources of sugar like raisins provides your body with energy, since your cells can easily use the sugars in fruit to drive your body's metabolism. The dietary fiber in raisins also benefits your health, helping reduce blood cholesterol levels and promoting digestive health.
Raisins also offer health benefits due to their vitamin content. The fruit contains vitamin K, a nutrient essential to healthy blood clotting, as well as vitamins C and E, which act as antioxidants in your body. Consuming raisins also boosts your intake of B-vitamins thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, folate and B-6. These nutrients help drive your body's metabolism, so your cells can utilize the proteins, carbohydrates and fats from food to help fuel your body.
You also boost your intake of essential minerals by consuming raisins. Each serving of raisins contains minerals important to bone health, including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus. Raisins also provide a significant source of potassium, a mineral important to muscle function -- even a small 1-ounce serving of raisins contains 212 milligrams of potassium, or almost 5 percent of your daily recommended intake. Consuming raisins also modestly boosts your intake of iron, a mineral important to healthy circulation, as well as sodium, a mineral that helps control your blood pressure.
Raisins and Weight Management
While raisins offer a range of essential nutrients important to your health, eat this fruit in moderation if you want to lose weight. While the dehydration process does not specifically add calories to fruit, the loss of water significantly increases the calories for a given volume of food. One cup of table grapes contains only 103 calories, while an equivalent volume of raisins contains 493 calories -- almost 5 times as much energy. As a result, if you're monitoring your calorie intake for the purpose of weight loss, it proves important to measure your serving of raisins to avoid over-eating. On the other hand, if you seek to gain weight and therefore wish to increase your calorie intake, raisins' calorie- and nutrient-dense properties make them an excellent weight-gain food.
- U.S. Department of Agriculture: National Nutrient Database: Raisins, Seedless
- Linus Pauling Institute: Potassium
- USDA: National Nutrient Database: Grapes, Red or Green (European Type, Such as Thompson Seedless), Raw
- University of Illinois: Gaining Weight the Healthy Way
- Harvard School of Public Health: Vegetables and Fruits
- raisins image by Zbigniew Nowak from Fotolia.com