What is Acai?

What is acai berry? To answer that question you need to know where it comes from, the Acai Palm. It is a highly prized trade and merchant item that has been used for centuries in South America. The Acai fruit, also called the Acai berry, is round, purple in color with a large seed. It can also be green depending on the variety of the Acai fruit. The Acai fruit is approximately 1 inch in diameter. The seed is approximately 7-10 mm of this size. This means that the seed itself actually makes up approximately 80% of the total fruit.

The inside of the Acai fruit consists of only the seed and a millimeter or so of pulp. The fruit actually does not stand up well after harvest which is why it is usually only available in pulp or juice form. The fruit is abundant, since the Acai palm produces two crops per year with close to 1000 berries in each crop.

The juice and pulp both can be eaten raw without any preparation and are often used in cooking. In fact, the fruit can make up as much as 42% of some regional diets. It can be mixed into anything including cereal products, yogurts, ice cream or sorbets, desserts, entrees and side dishes.

The benefits of the Acai fruit are wide spread. The fruit has been studied formally since the 1930s and 1940s. It was not until recently that the impact and nutritional viability of this fruit was fully recognized. The nutritional content is rather astounding offering a huge array of nutrients including fatty acids, and 19 amino acids.

This translates into an energy packed fruit that provides the perfect balance of nutrients to allow your body to fight off the effects of free radicals and prevent them from damaging the body. It also can help you to look and feel younger by helping to improve the condition of your skin. Other nutrients include essentials such as zinc, magnesium, manganese as well as Vitamins A, D, and E. Those are not the only ones as the Acai fruit is one of the most nutritionally packed foods available.

Acai is one of the, if not the, highest scoring food on the ORAC Assay which is the test that measures the antioxidant capacity of a particular food. It shows the potential a food item has to inhibit the activity of free radicals within the body.

As a result, you can do just about anything with this particular fruit. Acai juice is perfect for additions to all types of cooking and the pulp itself is used as a food item or used as an additive to things like smoothies, desserts, yogurt even cereal and puddings.