Win Hearts With These Healthy Gummy Fruit Snacks

Win Hearts With These Healthy Gummy Fruit Snacks

Preparation Time: 10 minutes (chill for 30 minutes) 
Items to Have on Hand: Organic Pure Fruit Juice, Raw Honey, Gelatin, Silicone Molds or Flat Dish


This healthy gummy snack recipe wins hearts in so many ways. Kids love to eat them. They are SO simple for adults to make. And far from their highly processed and fructosed store-bought cousins, these gummies have no added sugar and numerous health benefits.

Gummies are an excellent vehicle for getting more gelatin into your diet. Gelatin is so helpful for gut health, detoxification, glowing skin, healthy joints and even better sleep.

It’s All About the Juice

There are countless variations for making homemade gummies. This recipe is optimized for health, simplicity and cost. It is based on a gem of a product at Trader Joe’s called Trader Joe’s To the Power of Seven, a blend of pomegranate, tart cherry, black mulberry, red grape, purple carrot, cranberry, and blueberry juices.

Trader Joe's to the Power of Seven Juice

You’d be hard pressed to find a better value on a pure, organic fruit juice of such high nutritional value. With no sweeteners or fillers added, it packs a high-phytonutrient punch for only $3.99 a bottle. A general rule of thumb is that the deeper and darker the color of your fruits and veggies, the higher the phytonutrients. (Phytonutrients are the anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, anti-disease, anti-you-name-it compounds found in plants.) This beautiful dark juice has some real powerhorses, including the surprising addition of purple carrot, which has far more phytonutrients than the orange carrot.

Simple Directions

Ingredients

  • 2 cups Trader Joe’s To the Power of Seven Juice
  • 1/2 cup raw honey
  • 1/2 cup gelatin powder

Directions

  1. Heat juice and honey in a small saucepan over medium low heat until honey is melted and liquid is hot but not boiling.
  2. Gradually pour gelatin into saucepan while constantly whisking to prevent clumping.
  3. Once fully incorporated, carefully pour into molds. 
  4. Chill molds in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Tips

If you don’t have TJ’s To the Power of Seven juice, you can substitute any fruit juice you have on hand.

If you don’t have silicone molds, you can simply use a flat dish and cut the gummies into blocks after they cool.

You can order molds at Amazon. Here’s the featured rose mold. Here’s a pack of 4 for a similar price. One recipe will fill about 4 of these molds.

You may have bubbles on top of the molds after pouring — they will go down somewhat if you leave them at room temperature for a bit before putting in the fridge. Don’t worry too much about them (this is the back side.)

When removing the gummies from the mold, pull the edges of the mold away first, and then push up from the bottom to keep the edges intact.

Did you try these? How did it go? Let us know in the comments!

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Sounds good. I have always avoided gelatin as I heard it was made from pig collagen, which grossed me out. Is this true?

    1. Well, the product I recommend (Great Lakes) is made from beef collagen, and some of the cleanest beef cattle. They are pasture-raised, kosher, grass-fed, have no growth hormones, antibiotics or steroids. This is also an excellent product, but more expensive.

      If you’re still grossed out, you can use a vegan substitute like agar-agar (requiring a different recipe), but you would miss out on all the health benefits these have to offer!

      Consider that in the past people were more likely to use the whole animal, head-to-toe, since they didn’t have the luxury of only eating half the animal that consisted of lean muscle meat. Not only is this so wasteful, there’s reason to believe it’s not healthy to have such an unbalanced portion of the animal. This recent rat study showed that glycine (found in collagen) balanced out the methionine (found in lean muscle meat, and known to reduce longevity) and led to greater longevity for the rats that had increased glycine supplementation. This leads me to believe that our relatively recent focus on only eating the lean muscle meats is just one more (of many!) factors contributing to the decline in our overall health.

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