Men’s Health on Acai: “Pulp Fiction”
We haven’t visited Ye Olde Superfruit controversies in a while, so I thought I’d link to this recent Men’s Health article on acai by Bryan Smith.
The upshot, say experts, is that no one fruit or berry, no matter what its ORAC score, fires an antioxidant silver bullet. “What I tell people is that you need to eat all these types of compounds, in all different colors,” says Navindra P. Seeram, Ph. D., who studies the bioactivity of berries and other plants at the University of Rhode Island.
“Açai berries are wonderful, tasty, delightful fruit,” says Blumberg, “but I have never seen any report demonstrating that they are any better than apples and oranges and cranberries and blueberries and so on. Where is the evidence?”
Given the undertow of controversy pulling on açai, it might seem surprising that we’re so willing to brave the current for more. But for psychologist Ditto, it’s an all-too-familiar phenomenon among American consumers.
“There’s this long history of ‘just drink this and all your problems will be solved,’ ” he says. “That’s why these superfruit berries like açai are so successful. They’re sort of exotic, and they have the trappings of something that sounds good for you. It’s easy. It’s painless. So people tend to be kind of gullible — ‘Sure, I’ll give that a try.’ And they’ll spend a lot of money for it.”
Ouchie! It’s a long (3 page) article, but Smith did his homework… it’s a good read.
November 25, 2009
Finally got a chance to read the whole article. It just amazes me how gullable people are. Standing in line to get something, (and pay big money fot it), that they can’t even tell you what it is or does.
Just shows you what a great marketing campaign can do for you’re bank account.
Tha acai berrie may be the “greatest thing ever”, but with no real proof, I’ll wait before I spend that much money to try it.
November 25, 2009
I’m glad he mentioned Mona Vie and the MLM’ers who capitalize on the “get rich quick” myth to recruit legions of folks to push these “miraculous” Brazilian berries… for 10 times the cost.
November 25, 2009
I’ve tried it: our local Fred Meyer store carries packets of flash-frozen pulp from Sambazon. It’s not too expensive on a unit basis: 4 100g packs run about $5.00 US. This stuff is about as close as you can get to what the Brazilians consume. So – like I do with so many other things – I trialed it for a month.
Needless to state, there were no miracles. No weight/fat loss, no burst of energy, no leaping out of bed in the morning to sunshine and birdsong.
Whoopti-do. Under the circumstances, I see no particular reason to supplement my diet with acai – my usual blueberries/blackberries are quite good enough.