(bright music) - Hello, I'm Dr. Daphne Miller and today you're finding me in the beautiful Sierra Foothills at the Twin Peaks farm.

You can probably guess what color I have on my mind today.

Orange, I'm seeing this in the gorgeous persimmons and the mandarins.

I'm also seeing it in the leaves all around me.

And as an eater, I'm so excited to bite into one of these orange fruits and taste it.

(fruit crunching) Mm, that is perfect.

Oh, there's also these little jujubes, which are known as Chinese dates.

But I have to say as a doctor, I'm also super excited about this orange because what it represents is a whole class of nutrients called carotenoids.

You've probably heard of like beta-carotene or lutein.

And these are super important for our health.

They aren't made inside our body.

We need to get them in our diet from fruits, vegetables, or from animals who've eaten those fruits and vegetables.

So when I'm looking at one of these beautiful fruits, I'm thinking, what is the value of this over going to a pharmacy, let's say, and walking down the aisle of your local drugstore and buying a supplement like lutein or beta-carotene?

And the answer to me is pretty obvious.

I mean, when you eat a fruit, obviously you're getting something delicious, full of flavor that you can slice up and cook and eat in a whole variety of ways.

So you're getting the pleasure of the fruit, but you're also getting this perfectly packaged series of supplements, possibly hundreds of them, that are put together by nature in this perfect way that we can digest them.

So this big family of carotinoids has beta-carotene, which in your body, in your liver gets converted to vitamin A.

And as we know, vitamin A is super important for our bones and other parts of our health.

It also has these other nutrients, lutein and zeaxanthin and these are important for lots of different things, but particularly for our vision and our brain.

And lutein is actually that nutrient that you need in order to be able to hit a ball or stay on balance or I really care about it these days because it helps you drive in the dark and I'm finding that more and more challenging.

So we also need at least 25 grams of fiber a day as adults to help us with our digestion and to grow the good bacteria in our gut.

And these persimmons are super rich in fiber as well.

Persimmon are great lunch foods 'cause you can eat them like an apple so you can just throw them whole in a lunchbox and there will be a unique, delicious fruit.

In terms of getting that daily dose of beta-carotene that I talked about, one sliced persimmon over a couple cups of let's say spinach in a salad will pretty much get you there.

So I'm super excited to go home and start including these persimmons in my daily salad.

Thanks for joining me at Twin Peaks Farm, where we just learned all the different ways that a farm can be medicine.