What is Acai Berry? The acai berry (pronounced ah-SIGH-ee) comes from the acai palm which is a palm tree grows in South America and Central America. It grows mainly in swamps and flood plains. They are tall trees that grow to be 15 to 30 meters tall – that means they can get roughly 100 feet tall. The leaves can be 9 feet long.

The acai berry is a small purple to black pitted fruit similar in size and appearance to a grape. It grows in bunches of 700 to 900 berries. The trees produce fruit twice a year. The fruits are about 1 inch in diameter with seeds that are about ¼ of an inch. The berries are harvested as one of the primary foods of the local people and also are an important part of the economies in the areas where they grow.

The juice from the berry, and even the pulp, is commonly used with other juices to make juice blend drinks, smoothies, and other beverages. It is also used as a flavoring for ice cream, mixed with granola, and in flavored liqueur. They can be used as a flavoring for or added to almost anything. The berries have a high fat content and deteriorate rapidly (spoil), though, so you won’t see fresh acai berries very far from the region where they are grown.

Now that we have talked about what is acai berry, lets talk about how you can get acai berry supplements. As I said above, the berries spoil very quickly so you won’t be able to get a pint of these berries for your smoothies unless you live in South America or Central America. The good news is that there are a lot of companies that have put the antioxidant goodness of acai berries into juice drinks, powders, capsules, and even acai berry chewable tablets.

When you are choosing which acai berry supplement you want to try, make sure you go with a trustworthy company and if you can get a free sample, you are reducing the amount of money you have to spend to find out how much this super food may be able to help you.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Fat Burning Foods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.