30 Juicy Nutritious Facts About Fruits You Never Knew

Holding recess before lunchtime can increase fruit and vegetable consumption by 54%.

2. Sunita Williams, Navy pilot, and NASA astronaut was the first person to run a marathon from space, running the Boston Marathon on the International Space Station's treadmill. Her fellow astronauts fed her oranges during the race.

3. When the bees in a region of China disappeared, people pollinated apple trees by hand using brushes made of chopsticks and chicken feathers. When humans pollinated, apple production increased by 30-40%.

4. Chipotle Mexican Grill uses 97,000 pounds of avocado per day.

5. Hawaiian Airlines lets you travel with a 10lbs box of pineapples or papaya for free on any flight leaving Hawaii.

Watermelons originated in Africa and were first cultivated solely for their water content. Their flavor was very bitter.

7. Ponso was a roughly 40-year-old chimpanzee, who was dumped on an abandoned island off the Ivory Coast more than 30 years ago after being used for medical testing. He relies on the kindness of a nearby villager, Germain, who dropped off bananas and bread for him ever since he was left to die.

8. If you microwave a sliced grape, it can explode in a fireball of super-heated plasma.

9. McDonald's franchisee invented the Filet-O-Fish as an option for Lent. McDonald's owner Ray Kroc wanted to sell the Hula burger (Pineapple on a bun) instead and held a sales contest. The Filet-O-Fish won hands down.

10. The "nut" in "Honey Nut Cheerios" used to be ground almonds in the recipe but is now made from natural almond flavoring which is typically manufactured not from almonds, but from peach pits.

A lemonade tree is a real thing, and it bears fruit that naturally tastes like lemonade.

12. Wild bananas are full of seeds and the ones we eat have been specially bred over the years to be seedless.

13. There was 'Banana massacre' in 1928. About 3000 striking workers were killed by colombian forces, after the US threatened to invade if they would not protect american interests.

14. There is a fruit that looks like a strawberry but tastes just like a pineapple. The name of that fruit is "Pineberry".

15. Figs are considered by some to not be vegan. When pollinated by a female fig-wasp, the fig's inward facing flowers trap the wasp, and her corpse is digested by enzymes in the fig.

Through a process called grafting, a single tree (Tree of 40 Fruit) has been developed that produces over 40 different kinds of fruit, including peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and cherries.

17. Coffee comes from an edible fruit. The coffee cherry is sweet and tastes like watermelon, rosewater, and hibiscus all at once.

18. Bananas have more trade regulations than AK-47s.

19. The avocado evolved to appeal to extinct megafauna (e.g. the giant armadillo) in order to facilitate seed dispersal via ingestion and excretion. This is why the avocado has such a sizeable seed.

20. Cashews, pistachios, and mangoes are all in the same family of plant, meaning people with nut allergies often react to mango as well.

Ethyl Formate, the chemical that gives raspberries their flavor has been found emanating from dust clouds in space.

22. Chad has the world's healthiest diet even though it is an extremely poor nation. It has access to vegetables, fruits, beans and legumes, nuts and seeds, whole grains, and fish, but almost no availability of processed meat and sugary beverages, or foods containing trans fats or sodium.

23. There is a fruit by the name of Black Sapote or "chocolate pudding fruit", which tastes like chocolate pudding and is actually low in fat and has about "4 times as much vitamin C as an orange".

24. There is a "Fruit Salad Tree" which can grow up to 6 different types of fruit.

25. It's a bad idea to use a banana for scale when taking pictures of a beehive, since the alarm pheromone to alert bees to defend their hive smells like bananas.