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Health Benefits of Water Chestnuts

While water chestnuts don’t have an overwhelming amount of detailed nutritional information, they do seem to have a reputation in traditional Asian and aboriginal medicine. They’ve been ground into powder, juiced, sliced, boiled, and eaten raw, steamed, or steeped in rice wine and used as a curative and food supplement.

Drinking water chestnut juice has been touted as a way to alleviate nausea, relieve suffering from jaundice, and detoxify the body from impurities. Making the powder into a paste is still used as a remedy for inflammation and is said to be useful, stirred up in water, as a cough elixir and for easing patients with measles.

Nutritionally, water chestnuts provide 10% each of the daily recommended value in vitamin B6, potassium (350 to 360 mg per ½ cup), copper, riboflavin, and manganese, with a respectable array of smaller amounts of other vitamins and minerals, as well. The corms are a rich source of carbohydrates, which relates itself in a starchy texture. Fiber is another ingredient in very good supply, which is effective for keeping your system running smoothly. However, water chestnut has no cholesterol to speak of or vitamin A at all. Fresh raw water chestnuts contain slightly more fat than the canned variety, but it’s the good kind.

Studies have found water chestnuts to contain flavonoid antioxidants like catechins, specifically epicatechins (as do dark chocolate, red wine, and green tea). Early aboriginal medicine men crushed the outsides of the bulb for wound application and healing, which science now knows releases antimicrobial effects. Inside water chestnuts are an antibiotic compound called “puchin” which acts in immune function like penicillin.