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A New Orange Banana Could Save Hundreds of Thousands of Lives a Year
A lot of people are still suspicious about GMOs . . . that's "genetically modified organisms." But it's hard to argue THIS isn't good news . . .
For the past ten years, researchers in Australia have been working on a new type of banana that could save hundreds of thousands of lives EVERY YEAR.
They crossbred two types. One is a normal Cavendish banana, which is what you're used to seeing in grocery stores. The other is a smaller type from New Guinea that's extremely high in vitamin A.
That's important, because up to 750,000 children die every year from a vitamin A deficiency, mostly in Africa. So the new bananas are bigger, easier to grow, and packed with WAY more vitamin A than the kind people eat in places like Uganda.
The weird part is all that vitamin A makes the bananas ORANGE. The peel is slightly orange instead of yellow, and the part you eat is orange too. (I know there's an "orange you glad I didn't say banana" joke in here somewhere.)
The next step is trying to grow them on a massive scale in Africa. The researchers still have another six years of red tape to get through, but it's looking pretty good right now.
And if you're wondering who's behind this whole thing, most of the funding for the study has come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
(Newsweek / FruitNet.com)
(Here are some photos of them compared to normal bananas.)
