Nutrition: Keep Your Bananas Longer

All runners know that bananas are an important staple in your running diet. If you didn’t know, here’s your news flash; bananas are an awesome running food. Bananas have a natural anti-acid affect on the body and help calm the stomach, making it easy to eat bananas right before or during exercise. Research has shown that 2 bananas serve up enough energy for 90 min of strenuous exercise and bananas are a natural source of potassium - an indispensable mineral which aids oxygen transportation to our organs, helps to regularize heartbeat as well as fluid levels in the body and can help combat the muscle cramps runners sometimes get after strenuous workouts when electrolyte levels are low.

So the question is not if bananas should be in your diet, but rather how do we keep bananas around longer so they’re there when we need them…

Everyone knows how quickly bananas turn brown when sitting on your kitchen counter, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to toss over-ripe bananas. So how do we keep them at their peak longer?

Bananas are picked while still green and transported in a controlled environment to ripening houses near where they will be sold. There they are subjected to ethylene, a chemical produced naturally by many ripening fruit (and produced naturally by bananas as well), which stimulates the formation of amylase, an enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar. This causes the ripening process to begin and the starch in the banana begins breaking down into sucrose, fructose and glucose, the sugars that give bananas their sweater taste, and make them a good source of energy (glucose). It is at this point that they’re transported to the grocery store, and we buy them.

Once you buy your bananas (probably at some level of green) you need to let them finish ripening before you eat them. This is best done at a room temperature environment in a manner that they won’t be bruised. A good way to do this is to hang them on a banana hook, which helps the bananas ripen with fewer bruises and brown spots. If you need a couple bananas to ripen faster, put them in a paper bag with an apple (which produces ethylene) to ripen over night.

Once the bananas are ripe, the best way to keep them is putting them in the fridge. Remember, this is AFTER they’ve hit their peak ripeness, as putting them in the fridge too early will irreversibly halt the ripening process, leaving you with under ripened fruit. Refrigerated, the peal will turn brown, but the fruit will stay good for several days.

If you want to keep your bananas even longer (up to 2 months), peel them, sprinkle them with lemon juice to prevent browning, wrap them in plastic wrap and throw them in the freezer for a cold snack or addition to your frozen smoothie.


As a final note, if you needed more evidence of why you should have bananas on hand: they are a great hangover cure. One quick way to soothe hangovers is to make a banana shake with a little honey. Bananas calm the stomach while honey replenishes sugar levels and comforts the body.  Not that I've ever needed a hangover cure...