The claim: Bananas in grocery stores are ‘fake,’ lack nutrients because they don’t produce seeds
A July 25 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) shows a series of animated bananas, scientists and men wearing sunglasses along with text that suggests something is wrong with seedless bananas in the grocery store.
“When a fruit does not contain its seeds, it no longer has its beneficial nutrients,” says the narrator, who also claims bananas are “fake,” genetically modified and “created and man-made in a lab.”
It was shared more than 40,000 times in six days.
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Our rating: False
Experts say a banana’s lack of seeds has no effect on its nutritional value. The absence of seeds is due to thousands of years of natural selection – not because scientists in a lab modified the fruit’s genetic code.
Seedless bananas have vitamins, fiber and potassium
Jonathan Crane, a tropical fruit crop specialist at the University of Florida, called the claims in the video “uninformed” and says bananas are good sources of several key nutrients.
The fruits contain significant amounts of vitamins A, C and B6 along with dietary fiber and 9% of the daily requirement of potassium, according to experts and the Department of Agriculture.
Fact check: No, banana color doesn’t indicate artificial ripening
However, it is true the type of banana commonly found in the produce section, the Cavendish, does not bear traditional seeds.
A close look along the center of a peeled banana reveals tiny black specks. Those are vestigial seeds – or, “just little remnants of what was a seed,” Crane said.
The change didn’t happen in a lab somewhere. Instead, farmers long ago recognized naturally occurring mutations and bred the plants to encourage those traits.
“People recognized this a couple thousand years ago and said, ‘Hey, you know, I like these fruits over here because they don’t have seeds which break my teeth every time I bite into it,’” Crane said. “They selected those plants and propagated them – in other words, planted them in new locations.”
Over time, the bananas that advanced were those that had three copies of their chromosomes – also known as triploid plants – as opposed to those with an even number of them. Triploid plants cannot split those chromosomes evenly to create a seed with the same amount from each parent, according to the Oxford Scientist. That means they usually can’t produce more plants and are seedless and sterile.
Instead of growing from seeds, banana plants either can be cut and replanted, or produced from the plants’ underground stems, called rhizomes.
USA TODAY reached out to the user who posted the video but did not receive a response.
Our fact-check sources:
- Jonathan Crane, July 31, Phone interview with USA TODAY
- Robert Paull, July 31, Phone interview with USA TODAY
- Department of Agriculture, April 1, 2020, FoodData Central: Bananas, ripe and slightly ripe, raw
- Iowa State University, Jan. 28, 2015, The journey of bananas: From land to your hand
- The Oxford Scientist, Aug. 8, 2022, Why bananas could disappear from our supermarkets
- University of Leicester, accessed July 31, Banana molecular cryogenics
- WebMd, Aug. 15, 2022, The health benefits of bananas
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