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Storing all your fruit in the fridge to keep it fresher for longer could be doing more harm than good.
That’s according to celebrity doctor Dr Chris Smith, who warned people have been storing cucumbers and strawberries wrong.
Cucumbers have evolved to mature and ripen in warm temperatures, and keeping them in the cold can cause “cold injury”.
"Fridges are below four degrees celsius and the rationale for having things at that temperature is that it suppresses the growth of the kinds of things that cause food spoilage: fungi and bacteria,” he told the BBC Radio Scotland show Mornings.
The virologist and lecturer at Cambridge University likened putting a cucumber in the fridge to trying to grow a cucumber in winter.
"It doesn’t like it," he explained. "The cells don’t like it, the metabolism of the cucumber goes off kilter, the ripening process is thwarted, and it produces chemicals that might not taste as nice and tissues that might not taste as nice."
But there is a happy medium between long-lasting and better-tasting cucumbers.
“What you could do is to let your cucumber ripen naturally on your tabletop or in the pantry at room temperature," Dr Smith suggested.
“Once it’s got ripe and you know you’re going to eat it, put it in the fridge, cool it down, chop it up into slices and put it in your cucumber sandwiches. Then you’ll have all the benefits, but it won’t have spoiled in the meantime.”
However, it’s not just cucumbers - it turns out people should also avoid keeping strawberries in the fridge.
“We tend to put those in the fridge as well,” said Dr Smith. “We eat them cold, and they’ve not evolved to be eaten cold, they've evolved to be eaten warm.”
Dr Smith fronts the BBC's Naked Scientists programmes and is also a science correspondent.
English (US) ·