Baskets of açai fruit. Photo courtesy of Sambazon, via the Nature Conservancy.
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Then came the mysterious fruit from South America called the açai (pronounced uh-SAH-ee). With its deep reddish-purple juice, and sour taste, açai is being marketed as the ultimate health fruit. It is packed with tongue-twisting antioxidants.
Açai has always been here. It comes from the same trees hearts of palm come from. They're expensive because of the labor-intensive task necessary to carve up an açai palm. Native to the tropical Central and South American flood plains, the trees are cultivated from Belize to Brazil to Peru. They bear a small, round white or purple-black fruit about the size of a small grape.
The Color Purple
The açai fruit might look like a grape, but it has smaller pulp and only a single large seed, and in South America is often eaten raw or used as a condiment. Because the fresh fruit deteriorates rapidly after harvest, it is generally only available as juice or frozen fruit pulp outside its growing region.
Açai are among the most nutritious foods of the Amazon, rich in B vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein and omega-3 fatty acids. It also contains oleic acid (omega-9), a beneficial fatty acid (often mistakenly referred to as essential).
Potassium is the mineral most abundant in the açai, but it is also rich in copper, and unusually high in manganese. Only a small portion supplies far more than the body needs of this ultra-trace mineral.
The big question, nutritionally, is whether these trendy little purple jewels are a wonder food, as so many marketers claim. The fact is there is enough research to make marketers happy. Experiments conducted at the University of Florida revealed the polyphenolic compounds from açai fruit could significantly slow the proliferation of cultured human leukemia cells. The actions of different compounds in açai appear to be separate, not additive.
Researchers at the Institute of Nutritional and Food Sciences of the University of Bonn, Germany, found the antioxidant capacities of the purple açai to form an excellent defense against three different types of dangerous oxygen radicals, when compared to other fruit and vegetable juices. (The white variety of açai showed very low antioxidant capacities against the same reactive oxygen species - sort of like the red wine-white wine difference.)
The health-promoting compounds identified in the purple açai fruit pulp include two major anthocyanins, cyanidin-3-glucoside and cyanidin-3-rutinoside. Interestingly, the anthocyanins accounted for only about 10 percent of the overall antioxidant capacities of the fruit. Two things were obvious: First, compounds not yet identified are responsible for the major part of the antioxidant capacities of the açai fruit pulp. Second, the power resides somewhere in the purple.