Chris Masterjohn, PhD

Bananas are a fantastic source of vitamin B6. B6 is needed for mental health, enabling calmness instead of irritability, happiness instead of depression, low anxiety and good sleep. B6 is needed to strengthen your mucosal and skin barriers, preventing redness, itching, and candida and yeast infections. B6 is needed for beautiful skin, hair, and nails. Most B6 in most plant foods is bound to sugars in bonds that you can’t digest. Animal foods are much better sources of B6 than plants but cooking them causes the B6 to get stuck to the protein in bonds that you cannot digest, docking them by 40%. Bananas have neither problem: very little of their B6 is bound to sugars and nearly everyone always eats them raw. Blueberries are a great source of manganese, but people eating plant-heavy diets don’t need more manganese and many of them are veering into the mildly toxic range. Bananas and blueberries are both good sources of potassium but to get enough potassium you need to focus on heavy volume of potassium-rich foods, not selection of one serving of a superfood. If you are heavily plant-based and drinking a lot of smoothies you should add banana to them. If you are forced to choose between bananas and blueberries in this context, choose bananas. However, consider eating a rare steak. And if you only eat rare steak, you are probably deficient in manganese. Consider some blueberries.