Reassessment of Some Fruit and Vegetable Pectin Levels

Several reviews of pectin as a soluble fiber have included unreliable tables of pectin content for fruits and vegetables. Values given for ranges of pectin content in the fresh, edible portion are actually presented in original reports variously as peel pectin content, dry weight values, soluble rather than total pectins, and some values have been for unripe fruit. This has resulted in reporting pectin levels for some products that may be 2-10 times higher than other published data on the same product. This report examines the original sources and errors of such data and, when available, provides other more substantiated published values.