It can be hard to fit five-a-day into your daily routine, particularly if you have a busy working day, and you’re constantly on the move. For many, juices and smoothies are the best way of cramming fruit and vegetables into your diet. Drink pomegranate.
Just think about it – pick a fruit juice or smoothie, grab a bottle, and take a sip during your day, and you can ensure you’re getting those much-needed vitamins and minerals, without having to go on the hunt for those hard-to-find fruits and vegetables at a grocery store each day. An even easier way to get your daily requirements is to use a quality pomegranate dietary supplement.
Pomegranate seeds are just one of these super-fruits you simply can’t do without – rich in antioxidants, a glass of pomegranate juice at night, before bed, sounds like a great idea. But just as it’s important to pick the right juices, it’s every bit as important to know the best time to consume them, to suit your body’s natural rhythm.
It’s Better to Drink Pomegranate Juice in the Morning
It might seem more convenient to cram those healthy juices into your diet at a time that suits your busy daily routine. If your day is extremely busy a quick glass of pomegranate juice before bed seems like the easiest time to do it. There’s good evidence to suggest that the timing matters every bit as much as the kind of juice you choose.
It’s all a matter of digestion.
Pomegranate juice has loads of tangible health benefits, but like most fruit juices, it contains some amount of sugar. Depending on the brand you bought, it might contain sweeteners or be diluted with other juices, which also contain extra sugar, without you even realising it.
Drinking pomegranate juice at night might feel convenient, if time is against you, and you forget about it all until bedtime. A health drink is a health drink, so perhaps it doesn’t matter when you drink, you might think.
While the polyphenols and antioxidants in pomegranate juice may work their magic, ingesting it all just before going to bed can lead to indigestion, and all that sugar needs to be burnt off somehow – giving yourself an energy boost just when you need some much-needed sleep isn’t such a good idea.
Why It’s All in the Timing
The human body is very sensitive to environmental factors, and responds to a daily rhythm. Human beings have evolved to maximise activity during daytime, and as soon as the sun starts to set, the body begins to wind down and prepare for rest, as a cocktail of hormones kick in, to say it’s time for sleep.
Our diets revolve around the way we live, and as we’ve evolved to be active in the daytime, so our bodies tend to harness energy from food and drink in a particular way. It makes more sense to be digesting things to boost energy levels in advance of daytime activity rather than at night, as a result.
A study conducted in the US, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, referred to a group of 110 university students, who were monitored, to see whether eating and drinking at different times of day had a material impact on their overall health.
The UK-based NHS was keen to stress that this study was not indicative of whether lifestyle and eating habits actually have a direct impact on body weight, as the sample size was small, but the study did find that students with higher body weights were found to have been eating most of their calories later in the day.
This is why it would be more beneficial to build your diet around your daily routine, so you are giving your body the essential energy and nutrients it needs before all of the activity you expect to be doing during the day, as opposed to taking it all in, just as you’re about to spend the next few hours fast asleep.
Think of pomegranate juice as part of the fuel you need to start the day, rather than something to cram in at the last minute.
Start Your Morning the Right Way
Think about it – you’ve woken up from seven to eight hours’ sleep, but you know you’ll have a busy 9-to-5 working day, and you need that boost to get you through the day. Not only should you make sure you have a healthy breakfast in the morning, to energise your body – drinking pomegranate juice daily, with a glass in the morning, could help aid digestion and promote a healthier heart.
A can of soda would offer you nothing but sugar and empty calories, but drinking pomegranate juice every day can actually make a real difference to your health. A single serving of pomegranate juice, in just a half-cup, is worth just 67 calories, and is full of B-complex vitamins.
The juice is also heavily-laden with phenolic compounds, and a July 2012 study, as published in the Free Radical Biology & Medicine journal, found that a drinking a glass of pomegranate juice daily for just one year resulted in a significant reduction in cardiovascular risk factors among patients undergoing hemodialysis.
Whatever brand of pomegranate juice you choose, the science is clear – it is full of essential nutrients that can help aid a healthier heart, and there is evidence to suggest that diets structured around the body’s natural daily rhythm are associated with a healthier body weight.
Add pomegranate juice to your diet today, and see what it can do for you!
Should You Drink Pomegranate Juice at Night?
