Age: As old as sunshine and the plum.

Appearance: Massive raisins.

Let me guess, sales have dried up? Nope. Quite the opposite, in fact.

There's a prune boom? Really? Really. Data from analysts Kantar shows sales are up 5.4% on last year, and Britain has imported an extra half a million tonnes from California.

Why? Mostly so we can eat them.

But why are we eating so many? Ah, at least in part for the health benefits.

Which are? Plentiful but debatable. Prunes are a reliable source of fibre, phenols and vitamin K and, according to some of America's top nutrition scientists, an "exceptional" defence against osteoporosis.

How exceptional? Very. There's no better fruit for bones. A study in 2011 found women who had eaten 10 prunes a day for a year had "significantly higher" bone mineral density.

That's more than 3,000 prunes! Correct. Nice maths.

Didn't eating that many prunes have other, ahem, benefits? Such as what?

The prune's famous laxative effect? Oh. Not so much. Because that's just a myth.

Really? Yup. According to the European Food Safety Agency, anway. They ruled that prunes are not a laxative and so cannot be sold as such back in 2011.

So how have we ended up with a prune boom two years later? Perhaps, partly because our association of the prune with a constipated pensioner wasn't actually the best selling point in the first place.

It wasn't? Nope. The word prune's connotations are so negative that the world's biggest supplier no longer even uses it. The California Prune Board rebranded its beloved snack as "dried plums" 13 years ago, becoming the California Dried Plum Board in the process. As they put it: "Why the name change? Because 90% of consumers told us that they'd be more likely to enjoy the fruit if it were called a dried plum instead of a prune."

These "dried plums" sound delicious. They're just prunes.

Do say: "A prune by any other name would sell better."

Don't say: "Three and a half thousand-odd prunes a year keeps the orthopaedist away."