Currant
Food · Fruit · Food, Typed Supps
Fresh currants are a berry. Dried currants are tiny grapes. They are different plants that happen to share a name.
Stage by stage
- Intake (Mouth): Chewing ruptures the skins, releasing juice and the anthocyanin pigments held there.
- Emptying (Stomach): Pectin and soluble fibre slow gastric emptying, flattening the sugar release.
- Absorption (Small intestine): Vitamin C is taken up by sodium-dependent transporters; fruit sugars absorb alongside it.
- Fermentation (Large intestine): Remaining fibre and polyphenols are fermented by gut bacteria into short-chain fatty acids.
Time to effect
- Days: Plasma vitamin C responds to a sustained change in intake within a few days.
Allergens
None of the fourteen major allergens. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, Gluten-free. Depends on the product: Keto, Low-FODMAP.
In season
June to August in the northern hemisphere, December to February in the southern.
Satiety
236 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — very high. Modelled from the Holt et al. (1995) measurements.
Environmental footprint
1.5 kg CO2e and 420 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Berries & grapes" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Cheap — roughly £3 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 46
- Protein: 1.4g
- Carbohydrate: 7.6g
- of which sugars: 7.4g
- Fat: 0.3g
- of which saturated: 0g
- Fibre: 4.3g
- Sodium: 2mg
Food vs. supplement
For vitamin C, fresh blackcurrant is one of the few foods that genuinely rivals a low-dose supplement per serving, and it arrives with fibre and potassium. Blackcurrant extract capsules sold for eye health or exercise recovery rest on a much thinner evidence base than the vitamin C content alone would justify.
Kitchen tip
Fresh blackcurrants are sharp raw and are usually cooked with sugar, which costs a good share of the vitamin C to heat. Freezing them raw preserves it far better, and frozen berries retain their fibre and pigment essentially intact.
Common myth
“Dried currants are just fresh currants with the water removed.” In reality: They are a different plant. Dried currants are dried Corinth grapes; fresh currants are Ribes berries. The dried version carries roughly six times the sugar per gram and essentially none of the vitamin C.
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