Waste Not, Want Not: Banana Peels Can Help Make Baked Goods More Nutritious, Study Says

The addition of banana peel flour to cookies made out of wheat flour seems to imbue these products with “improved antioxidant properties and total phenolic content,” new research claims.

An ordinary banana may yield a lot more nutritional value if one knows how to properly extract it, a new study published in ACS Food Science & Technology suggests.

The study, authored by researchers from the Aligarh Muslim University in India and the University of Houston in the United States, postulates that adding flour made out of banana peels to cookies prepared with wheat flour significantly enhances the nutritional and antioxidant properties of these baked goods.

The researchers note, however, that the hardness of the cookies increased proportionally to the amount of banana peel flour (BPF) used, but point out that “the hardness of the cookies decreased with storage.”

“The results showed that cookies enriched with BPF were obtained with improved antioxidant properties and total phenolic content without altering their physical and nutritional properties and also fathomed the favorable acceptance,” the study’s authors write.

According to ScienceAlert, this is far from the first time that scientists advocate for the use of banana peel flour, with previous studies suggesting that the addition of BPF can boost the nutritional value of baked products and enrich them with “higher protein, carbohydrate, and fat contents.”

Also, such use of banana peels can help reduce food waste, since the peel amounts to about 40 percent of a banana’s weight, the media outlet notes.