Test Your Banana Smarts

The plants, which can grow up to 30 feet tall, have an underground stem instead of roots. Smaller stems, called suckers, grow off the main one. After a banana plant bears fruit, the main stem dies and another sucker grows in its place.

Tightly wrapped, overlapping leaves form the plant’s sturdy “trunk.” Called a pseudostem, it can hold up a canopy of more than 20 large leaves and a 100-pound bunch of bananas.

This mineral does lots of things for you, like help keep your blood pressure stable and help your muscles work the way they should. It also may lower your chances of getting kidney stones and help prevent bone loss as you get older. Other good sources of potassium include potatoes, tomatoes, and green, leafy vegetables like spinach.

But it’s a tiny amount, and it only sticks around in your body a few hours. You’d have to eat several hundred to get as much radiation as you’d get from a single chest X-ray.

It’s hard to get more low-fat than a banana. A medium-sized one has about 105 calories, with no sodium or cholesterol.

Green bananas have a lot of starch in them. But as they ripen, that gets changed into sugar. While a ripe medium banana has about 14 grams of sugar, it also has fiber, which helps your body absorb the sugar more slowly.

As a banana ripens, it releases an enzyme called ethylene. That’s a gas that makes it softer and sweeter -- and makes the peel change from green to yellow to brown. Putting bananas in a bag traps the ethylene and speeds up the process.

People in the Pacific islands once pounded the peels and used them as bandages. Turns out, there was something to that practice -- scientists have found that the peels do have an antibiotic effect.

These look like oversized bananas, but they’re not as sweet, and their texture is a lot like a potato’s. While you may have had them sliced and cooked like potato chips or fried and served for dessert, a healthier way to have them is as a starchy vegetable with meals.

A strain of a disease called fusarium wilt attacks the leaves of the banana tree, and it’s had a big effect on the kind found in most grocery stores (Cavendish). Scientists are trying to find ways to stop this strain, which started in Asia and has spread to parts of Africa.