Pomegranate Seeds: Are They Good for You? Benefits & How to Open

Yes, you can eat pomegranate seeds, crunchy center and all: the ruby "seeds" are arils, juice sacs wrapped around a small edible seed, and eating them whole gives you the fruit's fiber along with its polyphenols.16 They're good for you too, and pomegranate is one of the fruits I recommend most for healthy blood pressure, strong arteries and healthy aging, at about ½ to 1 cup of arils a day.2

Most of what those little seeds do for you starts in two places. The first is the lining of your arteries, where pomegranate's polyphenols help the vessel wall relax. The second is your gut, where your bacteria turn the fruit's ellagic acid into urolithin A, a compound that helps your cells recycle their worn-out mitochondria, the tiny power plants inside them.849 That's why the whole aril works at the root cause, supporting how freely your arteries relax and how well your gut helps your cells renew themselves.

Did you know?

• A single pomegranate can hold anywhere from about 200 to 1,400 seeds, and their crunchy centers, once dried, make up about a fifth of the fruit's weight.1

• The words "pomegranate" and "pomegranates" appear 33 times in the King James Bible, and golden bells alternated with pomegranates around the hem of the high priest's robe: "A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about" (Exodus 28:34).10

• The oil inside each crunchy seed is mostly punicic acid, which makes up 74% to 85% of its fatty acids.1

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What are pomegranate seeds, and can you eat them?

Cut a pomegranate open and the inside looks like a box of rubies. Under the thick, leathery rind, cream-colored membranes divide the fruit into chambers, and each chamber is packed with glossy red arils, every one a thin sac of tart-sweet juice around a small seed.1 When people say "pomegranate seeds," they mean the whole aril, juice and seed together, and that's the part you eat. Pomegranate seeds can be eaten raw or pressed into juice,15 and eating them raw is how you keep everything the fruit has to offer.

The white membranes are edible too, though they taste bitter, so most people pick them away along with the rind. The crunchy center is worth chewing rather than spitting out, because it carries fiber along with ellagic acid, one of the leading plant compounds in the seed itself.1 Ellagic acid is the same compound your gut bacteria turn into urolithin A, so when you crunch through the seed, you feed that process with the seed's own ellagic acid as well as the polyphenols in the juice sac around it.4

Pomegranates in Scripture and traditional medicine

Pomegranates were on the table long before modern nutrition science. When Moses described the Promised Land to Israel, he named seven foods: "A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey" (Deuteronomy 8:8).10 When the men he sent to scout Canaan came back from the brook of Eshcol, carrying a single cluster of grapes on a staff between two of them, the verse adds that "they brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs" (Numbers 13:23).10 Jordan Rubin and I note in The Biblio Diet that in the Bible, this fruit symbolized royalty, fertility and abundance.15 For more of the healing foods of Scripture, see the Bible foods that heal.

Healing traditions far beyond Israel prized the same fruit. In Ayurveda, the pomegranate is considered "a pharmacy unto itself," used as a "blood tonic" and for diarrhea and ulcers.16 Tibetan medicine calls the seeds Saizhu and describes them as sweet, sour and warming, and its classic text Si Bu Yi Dian calls them "the king of warm medicine," used to strengthen the stomach and stir the appetite.1 Traditional Chinese medicine uses the seeds to tone the stomach and regulate qi, for a cold or sour stomach, bloating and enteritis in children.1 Another traditional text, the Bai-Di-Yi-Yao-Shu, describes the peel, seeds and flowers as sour and astringent and uses them for diarrhea and dysentery and to help wounds heal.1 Across those very different traditions, most of the uses center on the stomach and gut, and that's right where the modern research says pomegranate starts its work, with your gut bacteria turning its ellagic acid into urolithin A.4

Are pomegranate seeds good for you?

Pomegranate seeds are good for your heart and blood vessels first, and for your gut and cells right behind. In my practice, I recommend pomegranate most often for patients working on blood pressure, artery and heart health, and healthy aging, because it covers four bases at once: powerful polyphenols, fiber, vascular support, and cellular signaling.2 Eating the seeds gives you all four, and the fiber is the part juice leaves behind.

Every meal either relaxes your arteries or tightens them, and pomegranate belongs on the relaxing side. My High Blood Pressure Protocol ranks it No. 9 among its blood-pressure foods, as a polyphenol-rich fruit that supports nitric oxide and healthy arteries and a natural partner to beets and berries.8 That puts the seeds on the short list of foods that lower blood pressure you can enjoy every day.

The same few compounds are at work in your arteries, your gut and your cells, and because the fiber matters as much as the polyphenols, I put the whole seeds first and the juice second.2

How pomegranate seeds work in your body

Think of each aril as a small package with two compartments. The juice sac carries the color and the polyphenols, and the crunchy seed carries fiber, more ellagic acid and its own oil.16 Your body puts that package to work in two places, your arteries and your gut.

In your arteries, the lining makes nitric oxide, a gas that tells the muscle in the vessel wall to relax so blood flows through a wider channel, and pomegranate is one of the polyphenol-rich foods that support nitric oxide and healthy arteries.8 It also works on the system that tightens your blood vessels. Your body uses angiotensin-converting enzyme, or ACE, to make a hormone that squeezes the arteries, which works against the relaxing effect of nitric oxide. It's the same enzyme that ACE inhibitors, one of the most common classes of blood pressure medication, are designed to block. In a two-week study of people with high blood pressure, with no comparison group, 50 milliliters of juice a day, a little under 2 ounces, lowered ACE activity in their blood by 36% and systolic pressure by 5%.17

The second place is your gut, and this is where the whole seed earns its keep. I think of the gut as the place where pomegranate's real cellular work begins: the fruit's ellagitannins, especially punicalagins, break down into ellagic acid, and if you have the right microbial partners, those microbes turn that ellagic acid into urolithins.18 The path from your plate to your cells runs through four steps:

Only about 40% of people convert ellagic acid into urolithin A well at first, which is what a study of 100 healthy adults found after a glass of pomegranate juice. Before the juice, only 12% had urolithin A in their blood.2119 But if you keep eating pomegranates and get more probiotics, from a supplement or from goat milk yogurt, kefir or coconut kefir, your body gets better at making it over time.21 In a placebo-controlled trial in which each of 49 overweight adults tried two doses of a pomegranate extract and a placebo, 3 of the 6 people who made no urolithins at the start began making them.20 To help your gut along, eat more pomegranates, berries, walnuts and extra virgin olive oil, and get probiotic supplements and probiotic foods.22

Pomegranate is on the eat-freely list from the first phase of the Mitochondrial Longevity Protocol, and the protocol's renewal phase names urolithin A or pomegranate for supporting mitophagy.9 I also count it among my top 15 longevity foods, alongside berries, beets, olives and bone broth.18 It's a good example of food as medicine, working through a process your body already runs every day.

The crunchy seed also carries its own oil, which makes up 12% to 20% of the seed's weight, and most of that oil is punicic acid.1 In a placebo-controlled trial of 51 adults with high blood fats, capsules of the seed's oil, 400 milligrams twice a day for four weeks, improved the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL compared with placebo, and triglycerides came down in the seed-oil group.23 You get a little of that same oil every time you chew through the seeds.

Pomegranate seeds nutrition facts

Calculated from USDA FoodData Central record 169134 (pomegranates, raw), where ½ cup of arils weighs 87 grams; the 1-cup column doubles that measure. % Daily Value uses current FDA reference values.6

For a sweet fruit, that's a lot of nutrition per calorie. A cup of seeds gives you a quarter of the fiber you need in a day, along with useful amounts of vitamin K, vitamin C, folate and copper and a little potassium, for just 144 calories.6 The nutrition label can't show the polyphenols, though, and those are what most of the research on this page is about.

That same cup carries 23.8 grams of natural sugar,6 and in the whole fruit that sugar comes packed with fiber and water, which makes it a very different food from the same sugar poured into a glass. About ½ to 1 cup a day lets you enjoy that sweetness along with its fiber.2

Pomegranate seeds benefits, ranked by evidence

Pomegranate seeds help your body in seven ways, ranked here by the strength of the human research behind each: lower blood pressure, healthier arteries and heart, calmer inflammation, easier joints, friendlier gut bacteria, memory support and steadier blood sugar. The human trials on this page tested the fruit's juice, an extract or the seed's oil rather than the arils themselves, so each card names the form that was tested; the seeds carry the same family of polyphenols, plus the fiber the juice leaves behind.141

Pomegranate seeds vs. pomegranate juice

My guideline for fruit is to choose the ones that are high in nutrition, high in fiber and lower in sugar,15 and by that standard the whole seeds come out ahead. When pomegranate is pressed into juice, it keeps most of the fruit's potassium gram for gram, but it leaves nearly all of the fiber behind, so a 249-gram cup of bottled juice gives you about 31 grams of sugar with almost no fiber at all.7 Our pomegranate juice guide covers the juice trials in more detail.

The juice does carry more of one compound than the seeds, because commercial juice pressed from the whole fruit picks up punicalagin from the rind, 1,500 to 1,900 milligrams per liter in lab tests, while juice pressed from the arils alone carried only traces.14 The seeds bring fiber and the ellagic acid in the seed itself, which your gut bacteria convert the same way.14

I don't do fruit juice unless I'm in the middle of a workout.32 If you enjoy pomegranate juice, keep it to a small glass of 100% unsweetened juice, about 4 ounces and no more than 8, and eat the seeds the rest of the time.2

How to open a pomegranate and get the seeds out

Getting the seeds out takes a few minutes the first time and gets quicker with practice. You'll need a sharp knife, a large bowl and a wooden spoon.

1. Roll it. Press the whole pomegranate gently against the counter and roll it to loosen the seeds inside.

2. Score it. Cut a shallow line through the rind around the middle, without slicing into the seeds, and pull the fruit apart into two halves.

3. Tap it. Hold one half seed-side down over the bowl, squeeze it gently and tap the rind with the back of the wooden spoon until the seeds rain out.

4. Repeat. Do the same with the other half.

5. Pick out the stragglers. Lift any seeds still caught in the white pith with your fingers or a spoon, and set the pith and rind aside.

6. Eat or store. Enjoy the seeds right away, or refrigerate or freeze them as described below.

If the spray of red juice puts you off, use water instead. My mother-in-law has this trick where she does it in water, and it's so much faster for her to get the pomegranate seeds out.47 Halve the fruit, hold each half under the water in a large bowl and tap the rind with a spoon or loosen the seeds with your fingers. The seeds sink and the bitter pith floats off, so you can skim the pith and pour the seeds into a strainer.2 And sometimes we just buy them already plucked,47 since cups of ready-to-eat arils are easy to find while the fruit is in season.

How to choose and store pomegranates

Choose a pomegranate that feels heavy for its size, with firm, taut skin, because the weight tells you the seeds inside are juicy.2 Pomegranates come into season in the fall and are at their best from about October into January, so the holiday months are the easiest time to keep a few on your counter, along with the other winter fruits.2

• Whole fruit: keeps up to two months in the refrigerator, or several weeks on the counter.2
• Seeds: keep about five days in a covered container in the refrigerator.2
• Frozen seeds: spread them on a tray in a single layer, freeze them, then move them to a container, where they keep for up to a year; they're a little softer once thawed, which doesn't matter in a smoothie or sauce.2

How to eat pomegranate seeds

About ½ to 1 cup of arils a day is the amount I suggest, and it doesn't have to come all at once.2 Chew the seeds rather than swallowing them whole, so you get the fiber and ellagic acid in the crunchy center.1 On my show, I've described a biblical longevity day that includes a little pomegranate in the afternoon as a snack, and that's one of the easiest ways to start.21

One of the best combos you could ever have is kefir or yogurt with pomegranates,21 because you're feeding your gut probiotic bacteria and ellagic acid in the same bowl. Plain goat milk yogurt or kefir, sheep's milk yogurt and coconut kefir all work well.

Pomegranate seeds recipes

Pomegranate seeds taste great on their own, and they brighten almost anything you add them to, sweet or savory. Here are two simple recipes to start with, then more ways to cook with them. Where a recipe needs a sweetener, use raw honey, a teaspoon at most, since the seeds bring plenty of sweetness of their own.

More ways to cook with pomegranate seeds:

• Beet and pomegranate salad with goat cheese. Toss roasted beets with pomegranate seeds, crumbled goat cheese, toasted walnuts, olive oil and a squeeze of orange.

• Spiced chia pudding. For a warmer, spiced version of the pudding above, try the spiced chia seed pudding with pomegranate seeds on our list of chia seed recipes.

• Pomegranate berry smoothie. Blend ½ cup of seeds with a cup of frozen berries, a handful of spinach and a cup of goat milk kefir or coconut kefir.

• Pomegranate salsa. Stir the seeds into diced cucumber, red onion, cilantro, a little jalapeño and lime juice, and spoon it over fish or serve it with sliced vegetables.

• Wild-caught salmon with pomegranate and herbs. Roast a salmon fillet, then finish it with pomegranate seeds, chopped parsley and mint, and a squeeze of lemon.

• Anardana. Dried pomegranate seeds, called anardana, can be ground into a tart powder and sprinkled over vegetables, lentils or roasted chicken for flavor and color.

• Homemade juice. Pulse the seeds in a blender for a few seconds, strain the juice through cheesecloth and enjoy a small glass, about 4 ounces.

Pomegranate seeds side effects and drug interactions

The bottom line

Pomegranate seeds: frequently asked questions

References

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2. Axe J. Pomegranate: Benefits, Nutrition, Uses & Side Effects. DrAxe.com. 2026 (daily amount, choosing, opening, storing and season).
3. Ghaemi F, Emadzadeh M, Atkin SL, Jamialahmadi T, Zengin G, Sahebkar A. Impact of pomegranate juice on blood pressure: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Phytother Res. 2023;37(10):4429-4441. doi:10.1002/ptr.7952. PMID:37461211
4. Tomás-Barberán FA, González-Sarrías A, García-Villalba R, Núñez-Sánchez MA, Selma MV, García-Conesa MT, et al. Urolithins, the rescue of "old" metabolites to understand a "new" concept: Metabotypes as a nexus among phenolic metabolism, microbiota dysbiosis, and host health status. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2017;61(1). doi:10.1002/mnfr.201500901. PMID:27158799
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