The new watermelon has all the sweetness of a conventional variety but contains significantly less sugar.

Professor Shmuel Wolf headed up the research team at Rehovot and told freshinfo that the average watermelon contains 54 calories per oz, whereas the new variety has 20 to 40 per cent fewer calories. He added that the calories in a watermelon come from the sugar content. Each melon contains three separate types of sugars: sucrose, glucose and fructose.

"To create the diet melon, the research team isolated a variety with sugar content composed mostly of fructose ñ the sweetest kind of sugar hence one needs less sugar to make the melon sweet, with fewer calories to consume."

The research team found natural varieties of wild melons growing in the Sinai Desert and North Africa. These varieties have a high percentage of fructose. "But the problem is that they are bitter," said Prof Wolf. "Our challenge was to make them sweet."

Sweetening the watermelons was achieved using conventional breeding and cultivation techniques, without using genetic engineering.

It is expected that the new low-cal watermelon, now grown on semi-commercial plots, will be available for limited market trials next season.

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