Striving4Zen

Answer:

No, dried berries are not nutritionally similar to fresh berries-or at least, from our perspective, not similar enough to be considered as comparable foods. So much of a berry's uniqueness is derived from its phytonutrients. Flavonoids like peonidin, petunidin, malvidin, and many others found in berries are susceptible to damage from heat, light, oxygen, and time-since-harvest. While some drying processes are harsher than others, no drying process can leave the phytonutrient content of these berries significantly unchanged.

Since berries lose water (and therefore volume) during the drying process, their nutrient, calorie and sugar content becomes concentrated once they are dried. When you eat a handful of dried berries, such as blueberries, you are consuming more calories than you would if you ate that same amount of fresh blueberries. In contrast to fresh fruits, which we would place in the moderate sugar category, we would classify dried fruits as high-sugar foods.

The other thing to be aware of with dried fruit is the addition of other ingredients, notably sweeteners. These are usually always added to dried cranberries since cranberries are very tart. In this example, we'd suggest looking for dried cranberries sweetened with a natural sweetener such as apple juice concentrate rather than refined sugar or corn syrup.

Source

Labels: berries, dried fruit, flavonoids, healthy diet, nutrition