Acai is an important food crop in Brazil, where the fruits are wild harvested by locals and commercially cultivated for global consumption. The abundance of antioxidants present in the fruit has gained attention from the international community as a functional food and from the scientific community for its potential application in phytotherapy.
Native Brazilian Amazon tribes have a myriad of uses for the entire acai palm tree. While palm hearts are harvested as a vegetable and palm leaves are used to weave mats, baskets and thatched roofs, the berries are used for medicine and to make inks and dyes.
The fruit is also used locally to prepare a breakfast porridge called mingau, which typically combines acai fruit pulp, oats, nut milk and a variety of toppings like coconut flakes or cacao nibs. Westerners may recognize this culinary creation as the “acai bowl” made popular by trendy eateries and cooking magazines in recent years.
Acai berry contains numerous active constituents. It is abundant in anthocyanins, the flavonoid pigments with antioxidant properties that lend red and purple fruits their color. According to the Agricultural Research Service's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, the primary scientific agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, acai berry has an Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) value, which is a measurement of the antioxidant capacity of foods, three times higher than blueberries. In fact, acai berry heads the list with a higher ORAC score than any other analyzed fruit in the database.
Health Benefits: In addition to free-radical scavenging, certain types of anthocyanins found in acai berry exert other actions. For example, cyanidin and cyanidin-3-glucoside have an impressive inhibitory effect on low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidation.
Acai berry fruit powder is also a good source of dietary fiber, potassium and vitamin A.
