Left Behind

The benefits of acai berry supplements are quickly gaining a foothold in many households where people want the benefits of acai without the hassle of having to integrate acai purees or acai preserves into their diets. Maybe people don’t like the taste of acai but still want the benefits: this is where acai supplements play their role, too.

The acai is a wonderful little fruit — often referred to as a berry but actually a drupe — that grows on the top of the acai palm in the Brazilian rain forest The acai grows in large bunches of between 900 and 700 berries, and is harvested by the local population. The local population know the value of acai and eat tremendous amounts of it: up to 42% of their total food intake by weight consists of acai.

Acai has a high fat content — that’s mono unsaturated fat: ‘good fat’ — and this means that it degrades very quickly one it has been picked. Getting an acai berry out of Brazil intact is a challenge in itself. To counter this problem distributors make great products like acai berry supplements. Acai supplements have the benefits, and are not only easy to transport across the world, but are also incredibly convenient for those using them once they get there.

Getting acai berries from the Amazon basin to your house is a bit of challenge: they degrade so quickly that transporting as they are is completely unfeasible. So distributors have turned acai into a variety of different forms in order to ensure its safe passage.

The form of acai that you can buy in shops (and over the Internet) that maintains the antioxidant properties of the Acai berry is acai preserves. Acai preserves are essential just squashed acai fruit combined with a little bit of natural cane sugar as an accelerant. The acai preserves sold in some of the stores (online or off) are up to 99% full of acai fruit. That’s a pretty impressive statistic, and when you compare it with some of the blended juices, or even with the pills and powders that you see advertised all around, you can see that acai preserves are a great alternative.

Inside the acai preserves jar you will see a rich purple color substance which is a thick sold, puree-like texture. This, my friends, is just squashed acai with as little processing as you will see. The lack of processing means that acai preserves preserve any nutrients and goodness that made you want to take acai in the first place!

One of the easiest ways to get acai goodness into the daily routine of a busy family is through the introduction of acai supplements. One of the benefits of acai berry supplements is that they contain all the nutrients and valuable antioxidants that you would find in the raw berry itself. Unfortunately you are unlikely ever to be able to make that comparison, since you are unlikely to ever see a ‘real’ acai berry before it has degraded beyond recognition: the fruit degrades extremely quickly in even the most favorable circumstances.

The fruit of the acai palm is not, in fact, a berry. It is a drupe. The drupe is about 25mm in diameter with a seed inside that takes up around 80% of the fruit’s volume. It looks a lot like a grape but, by virtue of the much larger seed, has a good deal less flesh on the fruit. The similarities with grapes continue: acai berries grow in large bunches of between 700 and 900 on the acai palm.

Acai berries have a high fat content and it is because of this that the berry doesn’t last long away from the tree. Acai Supplements, juices and preserves are the only way to allow the goodness of the acai to travel properly; of these, the benefits of acai berry supplements are perhaps the most convenient.

There is a lot of talk about super foods, and many people are recommending a lot of different products and foods as being ’super’. What exactly is this ’super’ suffix, though? What makes a particular food ’super’? Quickly put, a super food is one that covers many of your mineral and nutrient requirements as possible.

The acai berry has become popular as a super food of late. It has become very popular with good reason, as really it offers benefits in terms of instant delivery of amino acids and antioxidants that beat its nearest super food rivals by an order of magnitude. The acai berry is the super super food, if you like.

While there could conceivably be some danger in consuming a lot of one particular foodstuff, this level is likely to be basically unachievable with something natural like the acai berry. The locals that harvest the acai berry in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil (where it grows on tall trees) eat a lot of acai berry. The actual figure of acai berry consumed is not known but some early reports suggest that as much as 42% of their food intake consists of raw acai berries. How is that for a very impressive figure?