Karat Banana Claims International Attention!

by Dr. Lois Englberger

The following excerpt of a recently published scientific magazine describes the Karat banana and work of the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, to promote locally grown bananas for their great health benefits. A second article printed in the Guardian, the national newspaper of the United Kingdom, headlined as "The Karat: a banana that's pure gold as food" compared Karat to gold. A third article was published in Italian in the on-line column, Virgilio Salute, naming Karat as the "Super-banana!" This flurry of interest followed a presentation by Dr. Lois Englberger at the First International Banana Congress, July 6-9, in Penang, Malaysia. Her participation was sponsored by the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, the main organizer of the Congress.

All eyes on the orange banana

New Scientist vol 183 issue 2455 - 10 July 2004, page 16

IT LOOKS like a fat carrot, but it is actually a banana… And it is so rich in precursors to vitamin A that researchers hope it could prevent children from going blind in the Pacific islands of Micronesia.

Dubbed the "karat" because of its bright orange flesh, the unusual banana has been used for centuries in Micronesia to wean infants onto solid food. But today it is rarely eaten there, as imported foods have grown in popularity.

That now looks set to change. A screening programme sponsored by the agriculture ministry of Pohnpei, a Micronesian island, has established that the karat is unusually rich in beta-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A. ...

Lois Englberger of the Island Food Community of Pohnpei and Adelino Lorens of the Pohnpei ministry of agriculture screened 21 cultivars of native banana all selected for their deeply hued yellow, orange or red flesh, a result of high levels of carotenoids. They found that 15 of them contained enough carotenoids to supply half of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A, if consumed as part of a typical diet. The karat was the most promising cultivar studied, and had more than 25 times as much beta-carotene as the traditional Cavendish banana (Editor's note: this is the banana commonly sold in the US).

Steam-boiling karats makes more carotenoids available to the body. But they can also be eaten ripe and raw, says Englberger, who presented her findings this week in Penang, Malaysia, at an international conference on bananas and plantains.