Green onions are an affordable superfood that don’t get the credit they deserve. Learn the health benefits of green onions, and get tips on how to choose and store them.
Green onions are just onions that are harvested before they’ve finished maturing. Instead of letting the onions fully form, farmers pluck them while they’re still young. The taste tends to be more mild, and as it turns out, this makes them even more nutrient dense than full-grown onions.
Green onions add umami to any dish — just chop and sprinkle onto everything from soups and stews to stir fries or mashed potatoes.
When it comes to health benefits, think of green onions as onions on steroids. Onions in general deliver some surprising health benefits, and green onions contain those same healthy compounds — but in a higher concentration.
In an interview with “The Splendid Table,” journalist Jo Robinson explained that green onions contain 100 times more phytonutrients than full-grown onions do. Robinson says that the green parts are where you can find most of the phytonutrient goodness in green onions.
Like onions, green onions contain compounds that:
• support immune health
• regulate blood sugar
• are anti-inflammatory
• prevent cancer — The cancer-preventing phytonutrient in onions is called quercetin.
• protect us from peptic ulcers by inhibiting the growth of a bacteria that attacks the stomach lining