Lois is a longtime Deseret News special projects and family issues reporter, including health, parenting, aging and policy.
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KEY POINTS
- Instead of throwing away watermelon rind, you can eat it.
- Watermelon rind now has a standardized nutrition profile in FoodData Central.
- Rind is good for digestion, blood pressure and blood flow and provides potassium and fiber.
This food item is good for digestion, lowers blood pressure, improves blood flow, and provides both potassium and fiber. It’s also quite likely that you’ve been throwing it away all summer
The appreciation meter is ticking up for watermelon rind, which now has an official nutrition profile in USDA FoodData Central, providing everyone from nutritionists, researchers and cooks with standardized nutrition data that could divert it from landfills and compost piles into recipes and stomachs
According to the profile on the U.S. Department of Agriculture page, the raw rind of a seedless watermelon is nearly 95% water, but 100 grams packs 19 kcals of energy, 1.5 grams of dietary fiber, 272 milligrams of potassium, 21 milligrams of phosphorus and 7 milligrams of vitamin C, among other things
That’s all pretty inscrutable. What’s easier to read is how versatile the rind is. According to a studyin the journal Agricultural and Food Chemistry, watermelon rind is a goodcles and blood vessels healthy. The study says citrulline “has also been shown to reduce the recovery heart rate and muscle soreness after 24 hours.”
According to Verywell Health, citrulline is a “powerful precursor to nitric oxide.”
Verywell Health calls the rind “more nutritious than the flesh,” adding kudos to the rind for providing “meaningful amounts” of vitamin B6 and magnesium, among other things
And talk about insoluble dietary fiber. The rind has lots of fiber, helping the digestion system keep things moving, helping control sugar spikes and providing a sense of satiety
Easy ways to eat watermelon rind
But there’s a caveat. Verywell Health notes that you’d have to eat between 1 and 1.5 cups of rind to get meaningful amounts of the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants
But accessing the good stuff in the rind isn’t really that hard. All of it is edible, though some people peel off the green to eat the white between it and the pink inner part. That’s more a matter of taste than anything actually wrong with eating the green
Verywell Health describes the green as bitter, the white more akin to cucumber. And rind can be pickled or added to stir fry, chutneys, salads and smoothies, per the article, which notes that “some food scientists are exploring ways to add watermelon rinds to food products, such as mixing powdered rinds with wheat flour for baked goods to boost fiber content.”
Vitacost’s Upside blog lists seven ways to use watermelon rinds. You can use it to make:
- A smoothie
- Pickled watermelon rind
- Fermented watermelon rind
- Watermelon rind candy
- Watermelon rind curry
- Watermelon rind preserves
- Watermelon rind gazpacho
Wash produce before eating
In a season that’s been filled with produce problems including cyclosporiasis and E. coli, most people know they need to wash their fruits and vegetables or cook them. But watermelon actually grows on the ground, so cleaning it before you cut it helps remove dirt, bacteria and also pesticides or other things that have been sprayed outdoors
Even if you don’t intend to eat the green thin outer skin of the rind, it’s important to wash a melon under running water before cutting into it, as the knife could become contaminated and actually deliver contaminants to the pink part
Also, watermelon rind is perishable. If you don’t use it right away, it can be stored, per Vitacost, for about five days. It can also be cut into pieces and frozen to use later in smoothies, soups and other blended recipes
