Bell Peppers – These Facts Will Make You Love Them

Bell peppers are a fascinating food. They are a fruit, of course, but they are typically categorized as vegetables because of how we use them in main dishes, soups, or salads. We also eat them at different stages of ripeness, and these stages determine their color, flavor, and even their nutritional profile.

If you buy a green bell pepper and let it ripen, that same pepper will lose vitamin K content, while gaining other nutrients as it goes from green to yellow, orange, and finally red. But even at its youngest stage, this green bell pepper will provide some good nutrition, especially vitamins B6 and C.

Speaking of vitamin C, the amount in bell peppers is astonishingly higher than what we can find in an orange or a cup of strawberries. One cup of diced, raw, green bell peppers gives us over one and a half our Daily Value. A cup of diced, raw, red bell peppers gives us more than double! If we cook it, we’re still going to get about one and a half our Daily Value.

This matters a lot because vitamin C helps us absorb iron and calcium better. If we add bell peppers to our bean soup, our chickpea hummus, or our kale salad, not only will we be making a delicious dish, we will also be bumping up our absorption of these two key nutrients. Isn’t it fun to be nutrisavvy?

Other top nutrients in bell peppers as they mature include vitamin A, vitamin B2, folate, vitamin E, and potassium. This means that bell peppers are also great for our heart, our immune system, our eyes, our brain, our bones, our muscles, our red blood cells, and our metabolism.

Try our personalized nutrition calculator below to see just how much nutrition you and your family can get from eating bell peppers, raw or cooked, and at different ripening stages.