Himachal Apples = Health hazard?

Why is it that Times Group always seems to throw up cool stuffs for me? It was in Economic Times that I found out an Israeli scientist saying if an adult could eat an apple, a pomegranate, a tomato and an onion daily, no disease would come to him.

I immediately like the idea and just started the daily regimen of eating the above four plus a lemon.

With this fruit regimen in place, I also cut down on my rice—almost to 1/3 of what I used to take. Because I substituted rice with four flat breads taken with moong dal cooked with the onion and the tomato.

Cutting down on rice is really good. Now, I’m what you call lean and mean type. No flab—absolutely not!

Then, a month back, I went in for brown rice. Becoming better and better!!

What I eat for the dinner is what you brown bread( that is, made from atta). But, what I eat for my breakfast—the sliced bread is all white bread (made from maida). Imphal has no sliced brown bread.

When everything seems so ideal, something nasty just happened.

A friend of mine told me that what we eat as an apple is in fact full of a zinc derivative. Zinc derivative! He explained that the chemical itself was administered at the final stage of plantation of the apple plants. When such plants bear fruits they have much longer shelf life. That’s how apple grown mainly Himachal Pradesh can be transported all over India without using any cold chain and that too, in the Indian heat.

Come to think of this: From the farms to the wholesalers must be a several-days cycle. Then, several days of train journey. In our case, 2/3 more days of truck ride. Then, several more days in retailers’ shelf.

All these do not pass through a single cold chain. This is possible only because of the Zinc derivative, my friend told me.

What do you think of this?

For my part, I stopped eating apples. Then, pomegranates. (Manipur pomegranates last for some months in a year, that too because of lack of cold chains).

The title of this post—Himachal Apple = Health hazard?—is deliberate. I want to see if someone in business of Apples has, by any chance, some keywords alerts on the web.