Superfruits

Can adding açai or other superfruits to your daily diet keep the doctor away?

They won’t help you leap tall buildings in a single bound, but they can help you fight off bad guys like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. What are they? The superfruits.

What makes fruits such as mangosteen, goji berries, and noni “super” compared with everyday apples, oranges, and bananas? It’s an exotic allure and whopping nutrient content.

Wayne Geilman, PhD, a nutrition and food science consultant, explains, “Superfruits haven’t been defined scientifically, but it’s generally agreed that they’re valued in their native countries for their medicinal or health-enhancing properties and that they have a high antioxidant content—usually double, triple, or more than that of other fruits—as defined by their ORAC [Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity] score.”

Superfruits have captured Americans’ imagination over the last five years, and as a result, generated an enthusiasm that’s fueled a $20 billion industry in the United States, according to “Functional, Fortified and Inherently Healthy Foods and Beverages: The U.S. Phood Market,” by Packaged Facts, a market research firm.

The real clue as to whether these superfruits will go mainstream or the way of the dinosaur won’t necessarily boil down to conclusive proof of their health benefits. What will give them legs enough to stand as a daily part of a healthful diet is taste and, as Geilman says, “the ‘can-you-hold-it-in-one-hand-and-eat-it-or-drink-it-while-driving’ test.”

Açai (Euterpe oleracea)
Background: The blueberry-sized dark purple açai (as-sa-E) fruit grows in clusters on palmberry plants in the Amazon rainforest of South America.

Benefits: Brazilian surfers have long sworn by the energizing effects of the açai, downing bowlfuls of the fruit’s pulp whipped by street vendors into a frozen slushy treat. The fruit achieved stardom status when Nicholas Perricone, MD, touted it as one of the top 10 superfoods for age-defying beauty on Oprah, as well as in his book, The Perricone Promise.

More clinically, researchers at the University of Florida at Gainesville have discovered that antioxidants in açai cause a self-destruct response in 86% of leukemia cells tested in a model system. These same researchers and others are testing to see how the açai stacks up against the mechanisms that cause high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, and prostate enlargement.

Açai’s claim to nutritional fame is an antioxidant content 33 times that of red wine grapes and twice that of blueberries, chiefly from the purple pigments called anthocyanins. These berries also contain a number of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals, as well as dietary fiber, phytosterols, and monounsaturated fat—the same type of fat that’s found in olive oil.

Buy-in: Açai berries are highly perishable and don’t travel well, so they’re usually sold in the form of a flavoring, juice, or dried berry.

Mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana)
Background: Indigenous to the South Pacific and Asia, natives nicknamed the peach-sized mangosteen (MANG-oh-steen), with its dark purple rind and citruslike segmented white flesh, the “Queen of Fruits.” Britain’s Queen Victoria offered a princely prize to anyone who could import this unusual fruit for her delight, but there were no lucky takers.

Benefits: Dried mangosteen fruits have long been shipped from Singapore to Calcutta and finally to China where their rind is powdered, mixed with water, and drunk as a tea to cure dysentery. Today, researchers have isolated as many as six xanthones in mangosteen and believe these antioxidants extracted from the pericarp, or rind, are at the root of the fruit’s health benefits. Two primary xanthone extracts, garcinol and mangostin, have potential as anti-inflammatory and breast cancer prevention agents, but this has yet to be proven.

Buy-in: The mangosteen’s rind is considered bitter and inedible, but its fruit tastes sweet-tart. Don’t confuse it with a mango. An electronic pasteurization process may someday allow the fruit to be shipped from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. In the meantime, opt for mangosteen juice.

Goji berries (Lycium barbarum)
Background: Native to the highlands of Tibet, goji (GO-gee) seeds were long ago taken to China where they were cultivated and coined wolfberries. These orange-red, oblong-shaped berries are members of the Solanaceae or nightshade family that also includes tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplant.

Benefits: Chinese nobility as far back at the seventh century Tang Dynasty regularly sipped goji berry teas and wines in hopes of reaping this Himalayan health food’s presumed powers of longevity and rejuvenation. Since then, several Chinese studies have linked the antioxidants in goji berries to anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and cardiovascular benefits, but these findings haven’t yet been given a rubber stamp of confirmation by Western scientists. Goji berries have a gargantuan ORAC score: 8,430 per ounce.

Buy-in: A sweet treat in fresh form, goji berries are rarely found as such outside their major production areas in China. Therefore, they’re most readily sold dried like raisins or in beverages.

Noni (Morinda citrifolia)
Background: The pear-sized, green-and-white noni (NO-knee) is a tropical fruit that grows along the shorelines in Asia and the Pacific islands, including Hawaii. Pungent and almost putrid when ripe, the noni’s moniker in its homeland is vomit fruit.

Benefits: Long prized as a tonic by Tahitian islanders, the noni fruit, roots, bark, and leaves have been used for everything from a cure for constipation to a remedy for asthma, dysentery, and lumbago. Researchers at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad found that noni fruit juice added to drinking water significantly reduced blood sugar levels, and hastened wound healing in diabetic rats. However, other reports alternately have referred to or dismissed a heightened risk for hepatitis from drinking as little as 1-ounce a day of noni juice.

Buy-In: Noni fruit is hard to find unless you live in Hawaii or another tropical area. However, the market is full of noni juice products and some bars.

Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides)
Background: Native to both Europe and Asia, sea buckthorn is a coastal shrub producing bright orange berries that are super-rich in vitamin C. In fact, 100 grams of sea buckthorn berries contain from 120 to 600 milligrams of vitamin C, or two to 12 times more than in the same amount of an orange.

Benefits: Ancient healers in central and southeast Asia included sea buckthorn as part of their medicinal arsenals to fight off problems such as canker sores, peptic ulcers, and ulcerative colitis. No scientific studies to date prove this berry’s ability to remedy any diseases, but some reports show that sea buckthorn contains nearly 200 bioactive substances. India’s Defence Research Development Organisation thinks so highly of this fruit’s nutritional content that it set up manufacture of a multivitamin herbal sea buckthorn beverage to supply the country’s troops.

Buy-In: The vitamin C content of this berry makes for a real powerful pucker when eaten fresh. Fresh berries are virtually unavailable, but products are just emerging on the market that use sea buckthorn berries in beverages, along with fruit juices and boiled into jams, jellies, and even liquors.

Black Currants (Ribes nigrum)
Background: Native to northern Europe, the black currant is a small, dark purple, seeded berry that shouldn’t be confused with the Zante-type currant that is actually a dried grape or raisin. These fruits, long popular in Europe, are coming back to the United States after a long ban because it was thought the black currant bush helped spread a tree disease.

Benefits: Valued by British troops during World War II for their vitamin C content, black currants provide three times the amount of vitamin C of oranges, more antioxidants ounce for ounce than blueberries, and a significant source of vitamins C and E and the minerals potassium and copper. Researchers at the Laboratoire de Medecine Moleculaire, Hospital Ste-Justine in Montreal, Canada, discovered that black currants, as well as other dark red and purple berries, halted the growth of cancer cells in the stomach, prostate, intestine, and breast. Black currants have also been linked to protecting brain cells against Alzheimer’s disease.

— Carol M. Bareuther, RD