Soursop

What it is and how to eat it

Soursop (guanábana) is the fruit of the guanábano (Annona muricata), a tree of the custard apple family that the Dictionary of the Spanish Language places in the Antilles, with a heart-shaped fruit, a greenish rind with soft spines, white pulp with a very pleasant, refreshing, sweet taste, and black seeds. The Diccionario de americanismos records guanábana for the fruit in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. This page covers raw pulp according to USDA, with 66 kcal, 13.5 g of sugars, 3.3 g of fiber and 20.6 mg of vitamin C per 100 g.

A 125 g (4.4 oz) serving of pulp provides 83 kcal, 16.9 g of sugars, 4.1 g of fiber and just over 1 g of protein, so it works as a dessert or snack with a high-protein dairy food, for example blended with plain yogurt. It is soft, almost fat-free and eaten cold, and the 2025 nutrition advisory on GLP-1 therapy notes that foods that flow easily, with fewer calories and more water, such as certain fruits, can facilitate faster gastric emptying. The same advisory notes that nausea is the most common digestive side effect, and according to the Wegovy (semaglutide) SmPC, in its 68-week trials it affected 43.9% of patients, against 16.1% on placebo. The pulp is eaten with the black seeds set aside, where, according to the French food safety agency, annonacin is abundant, as discussed below, although the fruit and its juice also contain it.

What the evidence says

No health claim is authorized for soursop in the EU, whose register holds none, and EU law forbids attributing to any food the property of preventing, treating or curing a human disease (Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Article 7). According to Cancer Research UK, claims that graviola, another name for soursop, treats or cures cancer are not backed up by research, which so far has mainly been done in the laboratory, although it considers it unlikely that foods or drinks containing soursop could harm you as part of a normal diet. In Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, an observational, cross-sectional study with 160 patients with parkinsonism found that those with atypical forms had eaten more soursop than controls and people with Parkinson's disease (Brain, 2007), an association that on its own does not show that the fruit causes the disease. The French food safety agency (Afssa, now ANSES) acknowledged in 2010 that annonacin, a substance in the plant, is neurotoxic in cell and animal studies, but concluded that the available data do not allow it to say that those cases are due to soursop, and asked for particular attention to soursop preparations, such as infusions and extracts.

The sources for this section are listed under "Sources" at the end of the page.