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The world’s beefiest blueberry has been crowned by the Guinness Book of Records. Weighing in at a whopping 20.4 grams, it beats the old record for heaviest blueberry by 4.2g.
The blueberry, which grew at a farm in New South Wales, Australia, is about the size of a table tennis ball. The average wild blueberry is almost 70 times lighter in weight than the record-breaker.
It comes from the Eterna variety of blueberries, developed by the Costa farming company through plant breeding techniques. “Eterna as a variety has a really great flavour and consistently large fruit,” Costa’s Senior Horticulturalist Brad Hocking said in a statement. “When we picked this one, there were probably around 20 other berries of a similar size.”
Benefits of blueberries
Blueberries are often dubbed a “superfood” due to being low in calories but rich in nutrients.
One cup of blueberries – equal in weight to about eight Eterna blueberries – packs 3.6g of fiber. It also provides 16 percent of your daily vitamin C needs, 24 percent of your vitamin K, and 22 percent of your manganese.
Blueberries are one of the best sources of antioxidants of all fruits and vegetables. Antioxidants help to protect the body from free radicals, which can damage cells and increase the risk of developing diseases like cancer.
Consuming just 50g of freeze-dried blueberries a day helps to improve cardiovascular health, including by lowering blood pressure.
Record-breakers
While massive for a blueberry, Costa’s record-breaker is dwarfed by some of the other Guinness World Record-holding fruits and vegetables.
A UK-grown aubergine (eggplant) took the record in 2021, weighing in at 3.12kg. A mango grown in Colombia reached 4.25kg – just shy of the weight of the average adult human head.
A particularly massive Guinness World Record-holder is a USA-grown watermelon, weighed in 2013 at 159kg. That makes it about 15 times heavier than the average watermelon. No other watermelon has been able to break its record since.
