We’ve already shown you a long list of calories in fruit, but what is the best fruit you can eat? Wait a minute… what does that even mean? Best 3 fruits? Picking the best 3 fruits is literally trying to compare apples with oranges!

What makes a Good Fruit?

That said, it is possible to decide the best 3 fruits you can eat if we set some clear criteria:

It must have the best combination of nutrients,

By “best” we mean most balanced. In other words, a mix of a large number of different nutrients, in quantities that are big enough to have a meaningful effect on your health.

It should have the best price and availability.

If the best fruit in the world is a rare berry growing on a tree in the Himalayan foothills, it is hard to get and therefore not the best.

The best fruit must be reasonably priced and readily available from regular Australian shops. It can’t be one of those expensive “super-food” fruits that most people cannot afford to eat regularly.

The best fruit is one that you can enjoy any time you are in the mood to eat it.

The best fruit will be relatively unique.

There is no meaningful nutritional advantage between two different fruits which deliver the same sort of nutrients to your system. If one has a bit more of some micro-nutrient or other, it won’t make a practical difference to your health.

The best fruit will be far ahead of most other fruits in some special way. Eating the best fruit will give you a specific benefit.

Taste! It must taste good!

Not only must it taste good, but it must have some unique flavour, smell or texture that makes you go hunting through the isles. This gets tricky because people have different preferences, but, we can rule out most sour, bitter, tough, rough, fiddly, or smelly types of fruit.

Relatively low calorie count.

This is Calorie Counter Australia, so of course calorie count is a key consideration. In this case, the less calorie-dense the better.

Best 3 Fruits you can eat in Australia

There are other requirements which we will gloss over for this post about the best 3 fruits you can eat, let’s just get into the list, ranked in order:

Blueberries

Okay, so they are not cheap but they are widely available and they score really high across the board. Their stand-out feature is a very high antioxidant content.

Antioxidants are a hot research topic right now. Study after study shows one thing: they are really good for you, in many different ways. Current thinking is that they are anti-aging, anti-cancer, anti-diabetic and a whole lot of other “anti-bad stuff”. You may have read about stilbenoids like reservatrol and pterostilbene, well blueberries are stacked with them. Eating about half a cup of blueberries will boost the average person’s daily intake of anti-oxidants by 100%!

Nuts About Life Dried Blueberries, 1 kilograms” rel=”noopener noreferrer” data-wplink-url-error=”true”>Blueberries also have good quantities of many other micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and they have a low calorie density. The blue stuff in blueberries that give them their colour also kills bacteria!

Kiwifruit

Kiwifruit is so good for you that it might be considered a medicine by some people. Why? Because there is real peer-reviewed research which found that kiwifruit reduced some respiratory problems in children. Kiwifruit thins the blood with a similar effect to the “baby aspirin” commonly prescribed to people at risk of cardiovascular problems.

Of course, we are not advocating that you stop taking your meds! Keep taking your medication and follow your doctor’s advice!

Kiwifruit is special because:

weight-for-weight, it has more vitamin C than oranges
is packed with soluble fibre
has one of the highest concentrations of lutein (lutein helps to prevent age-related eye degeneration)
contains a very high amount of anti-oxidants (yes, anti-oxidants are a big deal!)

Kiwifruit also has admirable amounts of minerals and vitamins that you really need to get into your system every day if you are going to do the best you can for yourself.

Strawberries

That’s right – more berries! Strawberries make the cut because they have high folic acid, Vitamin C levels. They are also a great choice for all-round micro-nutrient content and low-calorie goodness. Also, they taste good!

With high levels of folic acid, strawberries have high levels of other Vitamin B group compounds like niacin. B-complex vitamins have many health benefits such as allowing cells to get the most “bang for buck” from energy sources like carbohydrates.

And yes, they are high in anti-oxidants!

Whilst this list is accurate given our stated requirements, consider that it may not be for you. Everyone will probably have a different list of the best 3 fruits for them, because we all have different lifestyles and preferences. The bottom-line is, eat lots of fruit and make the right choices!