8 Reasons to Include Pumpkin/Pumpkin Seeds In Your Diet

The orange veggie, pumpkin, is a fall quintessential that no fall meal is complete without the yummy pumpkins. Loaded with goodness, the vegetable is a fall tradition even today. Apart from being a versatile, yummy and budget friendly ingredient, it has wonderful effects on the health too. Although pumpkin is great for our mind, body and immunity, incessant consumption is not good. Read on to know more about its health boosting properties so that you can find more ways to make the most of it during fall and bring the veggie home off-season as well.

Reasons To Include Pumpkin In Your Diet:

1. Improves Vision

The color of the pumpkin speaks for the vision beneficial nutrients in it. Other than beta carotene and vitamin A, pumpkins are a wonderful source of lutein, zeaxanthin and vitamin C, which protect the eyes and enhance vision. Pumpkin is a magic bullet to avoid macular degeneration (1).

2. Boosts Cardiovascular Health

Pumpkin seeds make a wonderful snack to reduce bad cholesterol, which means the possibilities of fat deposit in your blood vessels is low and thus your cardiovascular functions are not hindered. In addition, pumpkin being a good source of magnesium, zinc and phytosterols, normalizes blood pressure and protects the heart.

3. Makes Skin Beautiful

If you are looking to cut down on your cosmetics to improve your skin health, then include pumpkin regularly in your diet as it is a superb source of skin beneficial nutrients such as vitamin, C, A, E and zinc. It is one of the best anti-ageing solutions that not only combats acne and dry skin, but also brings a healthier glow from inside (3).

 

4. Reduces Inflammation

The carotenoids, copper and vitamin C in pumpkin make the orange vegetable a wonderful remedy to ease arthritis symptoms. Not just arthritis, pumpkin is effective against any inflammatory condition too. Research shows that pumpkin seeds are equally effective as indomethacin in reducing inflammation.

5. Weight Loss

Pumpkin is an ideal veggie for weight loss, as it has high dietary fiber and is low in calories as well. Dietary fiber is quite valuable for dieters, as it curbs your appetite by slowing down the digestion process. Secondly, dietary fiber also reduces the rate of glucose or sugar absorbed by the body and if you are dieting then it is important for the sugar levels to be under control. However, eating pumpkin will not help you lose weight directly. You need to substitute a high calorie food item in your diet with pumpkin. For example, pumpkin pie dessert, which is of 300 calories must be replaced with warm pumpkin and cinnamon that is 80 calories thereby removing 220 calories from the diet (5).

6. Better Immunity

Pumpkin seeds are loaded with zinc, essential fatty acids, vitamin E and the antioxidant omega-3 and all of these help in boosting our immunity. Vitamin E is essential for producing immunoglobulins, which acts as our personal bodyguards. They destroy pathogens that harm us while the zinc increases the production of T-cells and white blood cells, which fight infection (6).

7. Diabetes

Diabetes can deteriorate our overall health. Pumpkin seeds aids in controlling diabetes by enhancing insulin regulation in our body. Resistance to insulin is the reason behind high blood sugar levels, which retards the absorption of glucose thereby leading to diabetes (7).

8. Prostatic Hypertrophy

Prostatic hypertrophy is a condition wherein the prostate gland enlarges and the condition mostly affects middle age men. One of the reasons for this condition is overstimulation of prostate cells either by dihyrotestosterone or testosterone. The oil present in pumpkin seeds can avoid this hormonal trigger thereby reducing the growth of prostate cells. The pumpkin seed oil contains omega-3 fatty acids and carotenoids. According to research the risk of BPH is reduced when men include carotenoids in the diet (8).