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Scientists Unveil Low-Calorie Watermelon

Posted on: Tuesday, 5 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Summertime dieters, rejoice.

Israeli scientists said Tuesday they have developed a low-calorie watermelon, with all the sweetness but significantly less sugar than common varieties of the juicy summer fruit.

"The problem with watermelon is that unlike other fruit, one tends to eat a lot and the calories accumulate," said Shmuel Wolf, chief researcher of the team from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The average watermelon contains 54 calories per 4 ounce. The new variety has 20 to 40 percent fewer calories, Wolf said.

The calories in a watermelon come from the sugar content, with each melon containing three separate types of sugars - sucrose, glucose and fructose. To create the diet melon, researchers isolated a variety whose sugar content is composed mostly of fructose.

Wolf said that his team had found natural varieties of wild melons growing in the Sinai desert and North Africa with the high fructose percentage.

"Fructose is the sweetest kind of sugar and so you need less sugar to make the melon sweet, hence less calories," he said.

"The problem with the natural melons is that they are very bitter. Our challenge was to make them sweet," Wolf said, noting that this was achieved through normal methods of cultivation and not genetic modification.

Wolf could not say when the diet melons would reach the markets.

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