Posts filed under 'About Acai Berry'
Would Oprah Winfrey lead you astray on such a vital issue as your health? Certainly not, so when she promotes a food product such as acai fruit juice on her TV program and her website you have to listen up. The Acai is the berry of a palm tree that is known to Brazilians as “The Tree Of Life”. This is because of its health-enhancing properties. Dr. Perricone, Oprah’s health guru rates it at number one in his top ten of super foods.
So what is so great about this acai (pronounced ah-sigh-ee) berry juice? Why would the TV food guru put a totally unknown plant at number one? Well of course, TV is all about hype and melodrama and frankly the whole idea of ranking foods is ludicrous and unscientific. So don’t go out and line up a supply of acai juice to put yourself on an acai diet to the exclusion of everything else. However this grape like fruit from the Amazon basin is a nutritious alternative to one of your daily fruit portions in your balanced diet.
Açaí is said to taste like a mixture of blueberries and chocolate. When ripe it is a beautiful dark purple color that is nature’s way of saying “come and eat me I will be really good for you”. And so Brazilians, especially in the Para region have been pulping it and juicing it and putting it in drinks and foods for centuries. Obviously you can’t go out into the rain forest and harvest a handful so you will need to find a specialist grocer or health food store. Oprah recommends the pulp in as natural a state as possible, without added sugar.
What really excites Dr. Perricone, apart from the sexy exotic nature of this cult berry is the large amount of antioxidants in each humble berry. Antioxidants, as all foodies know, help to slow down the body’s aging process. Red grapes are similarly blessed with antioxidants but only to about one tenth of the level in acai. The acai also has a life giving mix of mono unsaturated fats, those are the good ones, fiber and phytosterols all of which give your heart and digestion a really good shot in the arm.
Acai doesn’t stop there because it is a source of essential amino acids and trace minerals that are necessary to proper muscle function. In terms of fatty acids the acai is as good as olive oil. Oleic acid is a nice substance because it helps another nice substance omega 3 fish oil (also in Dr. Perricones top ten list) to get into your cells. And what fruit is rich in oleic acid? You guessed it, acai berry juice.
December 16th, 2008
All the best ideas come from nature. All the best ideas are simple. Take the nutritional labeling of foods for example. A simple color code to tell the buyer exactly how good, or not so good the product they are buying really is. A really good idea taken straight from nature because vegetables and fruit come in myriad colors and the more colorful they are the better they tend to be for us. The acai berry juice from the acai palm berry is a rich deep purple color and it is as if the fruit itself is calling out to us “hey look at me, I’m the best possible thing you can eat”!
The acai berry is loaded with chemical substances called anthocyanins. They give it it’s ‘come eat me ‘ color because they are flexible and abundant flavorful coloring agents. They are found in the red to purplish fruits and vegetables, such as the acai, the purple cabbage, beet roots, blueberries, cherries, raspberries and black grapes. Inside the plants they act as preserving antioxidants and colorings giving to the beautiful healthy hues of edible fruits.
Unfortunately some crazy organizations mix the acai berry juice with others. It all started with the guarana syrup which has caffeine as an ingredient. Then others took up the idea that caffeine could enhance the already perfect. So instead of sticking with the natural way of judging by the color you have to be really careful about what you eat and drink by reading the labels in detail.
The anthocyanins in the acai berry juice and pulp deteriorates very quickly. So, for the best nutritional value, acai juice should never be cooked, rather eaten as it comes as an enhancer to ice cream, or the key ingredient of something normally refrigerated like smoothies. Acai juice must always be kept refrigerated to keep its true health values.
Because the nutritional value drops hugely when heat is applied, you can get the most benefits of acai from the pulp as a frozen product. Freezers should always be kept at minus eighteen degrees and stock rotated within 3 months at the most. Allow your acai pulp to soften and thaw while at room temperature for about an hour. Then crush it and add it to your favorite extras or put it into a blender to break it down further.
November 17th, 2008
I am sitting here in Spain working on my computer and wondering, as I often do, if the World hasn’t gone a little mad. You see I had mangoes for breakfast this morning as they are grown all around here and this is the season for them. I was feeling smug at how health conscious I was when I read on the Internet that acai (pronounced ah-sigh-ee a very unfortunate name) berries from Brazil have fifty times the antioxidant power of the mango. So now I’m having an attack of acai envy.
Then I began to worry about all the resources and carbon tire tracks around the globe if I were to get hold of some acai berries for my breakfast instead of mango. You see here is the process: The acai berries are harvested daily during their season, in the Amazon basin. They are then freeze dried within a day of picking. The acai berry, like the mango has a huge stone or nut so ninety percent of it is inedible and thrown away. The pulp has to be separated from the nut to give a thick acai fruit pulp substance.
Now everybody raves about how tasty the acai is and how it is a true ’super food’ in nutrition terms and I suppose it does give employment and a good living to lots of Brazilian growers and workers. I’m intrigued by the idea of a pulp that is supposed to have the flavor of chocolate blueberries. The people of Northern Brazil have eaten acai berries for generations, and swear by its’ therapeutic and nourishing powers. It is the stuff of myth. But I can’t help wonder if they live any longer than me on average?
Then there is still the question of the carbon tire prints. Because the acai fruit doesn’t keep, so If we didn’t have power hungry freezing techniques and long-distance travel the rest of the World would still have to be content with eating their own locally grown super foods.
Still when you hear the figures on the antioxidant content in the acai berries I still get acai envy. You see apart from my humble mango it has twice the antioxidants of pomegranate, thrice that of blueberries and thirty times that of red grapes.
October 24th, 2008