How Berries Enhance Your Vitality
Hopkins just wrapped its 92nd Raspberry Festival. This festival started in 1935 during the Great Depression to give the town a lift. It was scheduled during peak raspberry season. Hopkins used to be filled with fields of raspberries, and this really was the raspberry capital of the country. Although the raspberry fields are gone, Hopkins is still known for having the worlds largest raspberry on 8th Avenue North, just a minute walk from our clinic! The Hopkins Raspberry Festival is a good excuse to talk about why berries are so good for our health.
Why berries, specifically
The USDA recommends two cups of fruit per day. Any fruit is better than no fruit. But compared with bananas, apples, and oranges, berries have more antioxidant compounds, more fiber, and less sugar per serving.
The color is the clue. The deep red, purple, and blue pigments in berries are flavonoids called anthocyanins. They're a meaningful part of why these fruits behave differently in the body than a banana does. You'll find the same class of compounds purple cauliflower and black rice, and it's a large part of why those foods outperform their white counterparts. Alongside the flavonoids, most berries carry vitamins A, C, E, and K, folate, and the minerals calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium.
Raspberry (Rubus idaeus)
One cup of red raspberries contains eight grams of fiber per cup. That is more fiber than any other common berry, more than most whole grain servings, and close to a third of what most adults need in a day, from a single cup of fruit. One cup of red raspberries also contains about 64 calories and 32 mg of vitamin C (roughly a third of the daily value), with only 5 grams of sugar.
The research on raspberries and metabolism is more interesting than most people realize. The best-supported finding is an acute one: eating raspberries alongside a carbohydrate-heavy meal appears to blunt the spike that follows. In a randomized crossover trial in adults with type 2 diabetes, raspberries lowered post-meal blood glucose at two and four hours, and lowered the inflammatory markers IL-6 and TNF-α at four hours.
A separate crossover trial in adults with prediabetes found that one to two cups of raspberries eaten with a high-carbohydrate breakfast significantly reduced the two-hour insulin response. And in Dr. Michael Greger's review of the anti-inflammatory berry research, two cups of raspberries were able to blunt the IL-6 rise following a sausage-and-egg breakfast, while the same quantity of banana could not.
Blackberry (Rubus spp.)
Blackberry is a wandering vine bearing quarter-sized composite berries. It grows readily in temperate climates and turns up fast in recently cleared ground, which is why you find it along Minnesota trail edges and fence lines.
One cup of raw blackberries provides about 62 calories, 7.6 grams of fiber, 30 mg of vitamin C (about a third of the Daily Value), 29 mcg of vitamin K (roughly a quarter), 233 mg of potassium, and 36 mcg of folate. Blackberries carry both soluble and insoluble fiber, which is part of why they sit so well with people working on digestion. Blackberries also have the highest measured antioxidant capacity of the common berries.
Strawberry (Fragaria spp.)
Strawberries are the ones with the seeds on the outside. Although, those technically aren't just seeds. Each one is an achene, a tiny individual fruit with a seed inside it. The sweet red part of the strawberry you eat is the enlarged flower receptacle. Therefore a strawberry is technically not a berry! We’ll keep calling them berries though!
One cup of strawberries gives you roughly 46 calories, 85 mg of vitamin C, 3 grams of fiber, 220 mg of potassium, and 35 mcg of folate. That's close to a full day's vitamin C in a single cup.
Vitamin C supports the immune system, and it’s required for collagen synthesis, which is why it shows up in conversations about skin integrity, wound healing, joint comfort, and the structural health of blood vessels.
Vitamin C also meaningfully improves the absorption of plant-based (non-heme) iron, which makes strawberries a genuinely useful pairing for anyone eating a plant-based diet or working to rebuild iron stores.
Berries and your health
In the Nurses' Health Study, women with higher long-term intake of blueberries and strawberries showed slower rates of cognitive decline. By the researchers' estimate, a delay of up to about two and a half years.
Frequent intake of mixed berries has been associated with lower blood pressure in people with hypertension and metabolic syndrome, and with improvements in HDL and LDL cholesterol.
The simplest way to eat more berries is to add berries to a salad, blend them into a smoothie, or eat them as dessert. Frozen berries count too! Our little one loves a bowel of frozen blueberries for a snack.
Below are two of our favorite berry smoothie recipes. Each recipe pairs the fruit with protein and fat. That combination slows gastric emptying and moderates the glucose response, which matters, because a smoothie made of fruit alone will behave in your bloodstream very differently than the whole fruit does.
Purple & Green Smoothie
1 cup milk or dairy free alternative
½ cup frozen organic blueberries or blackberries
1 cup organic spinach
½ avocado
1 scoop protein powder
Peanut Butter & Berry Smoothie
1 cup milk or dairy free alternative
1 Tbsp organic peanut butter
1 cup organic raspberries or strawberries
1 cup organic spinach
1 scoop protein powder
1 cup ice
A note from our clinic
Food is foundational, and it’s not the whole picture. If you're eating healthy and still not feeling well, such as persistent fatigue, digestive symptoms, blood sugar that won't cooperate, labs you've been told look “fine,” then that's worth a real conversation, not a longer supplement list.
We're a family-owned naturopathic clinic in Hopkins, serving the west metro and offering telehealth throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin. We take the time to dig deeper.
Resources
1. Schell J, Betts NM, Foster M, et al. Raspberries improve postprandial glucose and acute and chronic inflammation in adults with type 2 diabetes. Ann Nutr Metab. 2019;74(2):165-174. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30763939/
2. Xiao D, Zhu L, Edirisinghe I, et al. Attenuation of postmeal metabolic indices with red raspberries in individuals at risk for diabetes. Obesity. 2019;27(4):542-550. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30767409/
3. Zhang X, Sandhu A, Edirisinghe I, Burton-Freeman BM. Red raspberry and fructo-oligosaccharide supplementation, metabolic biomarkers, and the gut microbiota in adults with prediabetes. J Nutr. 2022;152(6):1438-1449. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35421233/
4. Systematic review and meta-analysis of red raspberry intake on glycemic control and inflammation. Curr Dev Nutr. 2024;8:102161. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38860149/
5. Franck M, de Toro-Martín J, Garneau V, et al. Effects of daily raspberry consumption on immune-metabolic health in subjects at risk of metabolic syndrome. Nutrients. 2020;12(12):3858. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33348685/
6. Greger M. Anti-inflammatory foods: the benefits of berries. NutritionFacts.org. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/anti-inflammatory-foods-the-benefits-of-berries/
7. Greger M. Best berries. NutritionFacts.org. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/best-berries/
8. Carlsen MH, Halvorsen BL, Holte K, et al. The total antioxidant content of more than 3100 foods, beverages, spices, herbs and supplements used worldwide. Nutr J. 2010;9:3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20096093/
9. Devore EE, Kang JH, Breteler MMB, Grodstein F. Dietary intakes of berries and flavonoids in relation to cognitive decline. Ann Neurol. 2012;72(1):135-143. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22535616/
10. Keservani RK, Sharma AK, Kesharwani RK. Medicinal effect of nutraceutical fruits for the cognition and brain health. Scientifica (Cairo). 2016;2016:3109254. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27127682/
11. Del Rio D, Rodriguez-Mateos A, Spencer JPE, et al. Dietary (poly)phenolics in human health. Antioxid Redox Signal. 2013;18(14):1818-1892. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22794138/
12. USDA FoodData Central. Raspberries, raw (167755); Blackberries, raw (173946); Strawberries, raw (167762); Blueberries, raw (171711). https://fdc.nal.usda.gov
13. Hopkins Historical Society. The start of the Raspberry Festival. https://www.hopkinshistory.org/part-1-the-start-of-the-raspberry-festival.html
14. Hopkins Raspberry Festival. https://www.raspberrycapital.com/
