Or, do toucha-de-mango. I am a recent convert to mango-eater. We went to Hawaii and got a papaya and mangoes to bring to the room. Mangoes were much easier to eat without a full kitchen to prepare them in, if I recall correctly.

I read today all over the internets that eating mangoes: Prevents Cancer, Lowers Cholesterol, Cleans Your Complexion, Promotes Good Vision, Balances Body Alkalinity, helps diabetics Maintain Blood Sugar, Promotes Sexual Health, and your digestive system and Boosts the Immune System.

Do I believe all of that to be true? Well, fact is that I don’t care at all about health claims. As far as I am concerned, all I need to know is that it is a single-ingredient food. The only label on it tells people what it is, a small sticker says ‘mango’. The little number on the sticker is so the checkout girl will know what to put in the register. My mangoes have no ingredient label or nutrition information on them. They contain what mangoes contain, and eating them confers the same dietary blessings that mangoes have given us since they evolved into mangoes and we evolved into mango eaters. That was probably a very long time ago.

If you are the kind of person that would like to see a list of reasons you should eat a particular fruit, here is one of those.  15 reasons to eat mangoes. If you eat the mango flesh and all, then you get all of these benefits. If you just eat the juice of the mango, then you have defeated nature’s intention, and you will get more sugar and less nutrients than you need. The list of benefits then drop to just a couple, but I don’t know what ones make the cut. I haven’t read that list. I do know that if you drink fruit juice it is possible to get too much sugar, or at least much more sugar than if you were eating whole fruit. Myself, I peel the mango, losing something, I am sure, but what I eat is SO GOOD.

If you haven’t tried mango, here is how you eat it. It’s shaped like and egg, and you turn it pointy side away from you, but it’s also a little flattened, so you stand it on it’s ‘edge’. Cut down almost in the middle and cut off the right side, if you are right handed. If you hit the pit, move your knife a little more to the right. Flip the fruit around so the pointy side is toward you and cut off the opposite side. You can try to trim off the fruit that’s left around the pit, but the pit comes almost all the way to the skin…its easier to trim the skin off what’s left and then eat the flesh that is still stuck to the pit. There are millions of fibers that are tightly attached to the pit, and what you do is bite and suck the flesh off the pit. You won’t expose it, but you will get lots of great mango in each bite. The skin is bitter, so what I do with the pieces I cut away is cut it in ribbons, then run my knife blade near the skin to cut the flesh away. Eat it quickly or the kids or wife will steal it from you now that all the work is done.

Here is a video of how to do it.