The Town Drunk

If you want real acai berries then you will have to go to the Brazilian rain forest. Seriously. Once harvested the fruit degrades so quickly that distributors cannot get it out of Brazil without some pre-processing (or freezing) which turns it into a different product. If you’re really interested in getting as much acai as possible then you should move to the areas where they harvest the acai fruit: these people take in acai fruit comprising around 42% of their food by weight. Wow.

One of the better ways to get the acai to your grocery bag is with acai preserves. Acai preserves really are just what they sound like, and you would make them in same way that you would make strawberry or raspberry jam. And like with strawberries and raspberries, the more the better; so it is with acai preserves which contain up to 99% of their volume as acai fruit.

Pretty impressive by any standard, but phenomenal when you compare it to the alternatives which can be pills and powders said to contain acai. I would much rather have the real thing in front of me.

The good thing about the very simple way in which acai preserves are made is that the minimal processing means maximum retention of all the goodness and nutrients in the acai.

If you’ve read anything at all about Acai, you’ve seen references to Oprah proclaiming the virtues of the Acai Berry. But it is actually pretty difficult to find any quotes or video of what she says. That’s because the scammers have been making all kinds of outrageous claims about Acai being some kind of miracle diet pill, and using Oprah’s name to try and lend credibility to these claims. So, Oprah’s lawyers have been VERY busing getting videos pulled from youtube. Above is a little bit of Oprah with Dr Perricone introducing the Acai Berry juice to her audience. Pretty skimpy stuff.

But there is a lot of buzz about Oprah shedding some light on the Acai scene on her “best life week” special runs Jan 5. The quote below is from her website talking about her struggles, and a little about the special. For the full hour by hour schedule of events for this week visit www.oprah.com

Oprah Winfrey opens up about her recent 40-pound weight gain and reveals intimate details about her struggle to stay in shape after being diagnosed with a thyroid problem in the January issue of O, The Oprah Magazine and in a special episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show airing Monday, January 5, 2009. Both kick off Oprah’s “Best Life Week” a multiplatform, company-wide event designed to help readers, viewers, listeners and online users confront the issues in their own lives and make a commitment to wake up and unlock their own personal happiness in 2009.

You must have heard of the recent settlement by Acai pills manufacturer Central Coast Nutraceuticals. CCN agreed to pay no less than $1,375,00 to the Arizona attorney general Terry Goddard. This figure included $1 million for civil penalties, $50,000 for consumer restitution, and $25,000 to cover legal costs. No small amount by any standard, and certainly a legal landmark when it comes to Acai.

And I’m really pleased. I’m pleased, because as one of the first people to be enticed by the CCN free trial offer on the Acai berry products that they sold. Except of course, it wasn’t the free trial offer. Neither was it just related the Acai products, because I got a whole boatload of other things I never asked for. Naturally, I had to pay for these extra items.

And this was the way that CCN rolled. They made their agreements unintelligible, and completely impossible to cancel. Thousands of people sign up to the scanner offers every day, expecting a good deal; what we actually get is a recurring bill on on credit card for things we don’t want.

I complained to the Arizona AG’s office when this first happened to me. It seems that many other people did too, because the catalyst for Terry Goddard to bring this action against CCN was the volume of complaints flooding into his office.

So, good for Terry Goddard. Let’s just hope that this will curb the unethical and immoral actions of the many companies offering free trial offers on Acai products. The reality? They’ll probably find another way to scam customers.

The benefits of acai berry supplements re 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 berry 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.

Well, to say it saved my life is taking it a bit far, but it certainly made my life a lot easier.

The problem, you see, but I couldn’t get Ares to connect to the sharing network. I’m pretty technologically advanced kind of person (in my humble opinion), but making Ares connect seemed to just be beyond the limits of my powers. Sometimes I would have to wait a few minutes to get connected, and other times it wouldn’t connect for days. Either way I knew that this wasn’t the way it should be working. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what the answer was.

I keep updated with the latest Ares client, and it was only a couple months ago I upgraded to the newest version of Ares Vista. This prove to be a great move, and I’m really happy with the software. Unfortunately, it didn’t solve the connecting problem.

On to Google I went, armed with my typing fingers and a search query of “Ares Connection Problems”. Sure enough I wasn’t the only one suffering. Kind of reassuring to know that you’re part of a gang, even if that gang is made up of disillusioned and frustrated users of a certain technology.

From from this research care little gem: some of the bloggers I was reading maintained that the problem was solved by the installation of something called AresConnect. Now, I’d never heard of AresConnect, I was a little bit dubious about shoving some unknown software onto my system. Fortunately my curiosity got the better of me and away I went to download and install.

On trying to connect to the Ares network after installation of AresConnect, I was met with one of those moments of intense joy and at the same time frustration with myself. Frustration, because I should have done this weeks ago!

So there you go. That’s how AresConnect (almost) saved my life.

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?