This green powerhouse goes by many different names like calabash gourd, white-flowered gourd, Tasmania bean, long melon, and the most popular – bottle gourd. Back home, we know it as our good old lauki. Bottle gourd comes in a variety of shapes and sizes: small and bottle-shaped, huge and round, or slim and twisty. It can grow over a metre long.
A vegetable that doesn’t always garner the best of reactions. However, with about 90% water, almost no calories and fat, rich in fibre and packed with nutrients, bottle gourd is quite a goldmine of a vegetable. Guess it’s time to start loving lauki! Apart from all of that, these are specific benefits it provides:
Improves digestion
Bottle gourd is rich in soluble and insoluble fibre. It makes food easier to digest and to pass through the intestines until it is excreted from the body. As a result, it helps relieve indigestion and constipation.
Promotes weight reduction
Being an extremely low calorie vegetable, 100g of lauki gives you just 15 kcal! Additionally it contains less than 1g fat which is equivalent to 0%. Therefore, bottle gourd is one of the best vegetables for your weight loss diet.
Watches your water weight
Bottle gourd contains 92-96% water. Moreover, it contains a great amount of potassium. And sodium? A mere 2 mg! Therefore, by ingesting lauki, all the excess sodium-retained water is flushed out of the body.
Good for diabetes
Bottle gourd has a glycemic index of just 15! This means that post-consumption, sugar will be released into the blood very slowly. Additionally, the fibre content further slows down the pace at which sugar is absorbed, thus making it a most suitable vegetable for weight loss.
Heart health
Consuming bottle gourd is good for people suffering from high blood pressure, as it is rich in potassium, which can help control blood pressure. It also has a high zinc content, which protects the heart from oxidative damage and prevents coronary artery disease. In addition, the magnesium in lauki regulates your heart rate. Consuming the juice of this vegetable twice or thrice in a week will help in maintaining a healthy heart and will also regulate blood pressure.
Reduces body heat
The water content of lauki makes it an excellent cooling agent in the summer. It keeps your body hydrated and your gastrointestinal tract cool in the summer heat.
Among all the health facts, the best known fact is that bottle gourd is a nutritional essential in Indian households. Freshness plays an important role here, not just for you, even for the vegetable! Preservation is an aspect handled with ease by Liebherr’s refrigerators – its EasyFresh technology and convenient vegetable sorting system is all you need to keep your produce fresh and accessible. So the next time you contemplate eating bottle gourd, remind yourself of all these benefits!
