Acai may help lower cholesterol

Research suggests that adding acai berries to your diet may help lower cholesterol levels, ultimately helping to reduce your risk of heart and blood vessel disease.

Diseases of the cardiovascular system are responsible for a significant percentage of deaths and disability every year, but in many cases adopting a healthier diet and lifestyle could help reduce your risk of experiencing these serious health problems.

Your cholesterol level is one of several key measures your doctor uses to assess your risk of cardiovascular disease, and alarmingly, statistics from the National Heart Foundation of Australia suggest that more than one in two Australian adults have high cholesterol. Could eating acai berries help?

In a recent scientific study conducted in Brazil, rats were fed either a standard diet or a high-fat and high-cholesterol diet for six weeks, and some also ate large quantities of acai berries. The results showed that eating acai berries reduced the cholesterol-raising effects of the high-fat diet, and also improved the animals’ antioxidant status.

Although it’s too early to know for sure whether acai would have similar effects on cholesterol in humans, there are several reasons to suspect that they would.

For starters, acai berries are rich in fibre, which binds to cholesterol and enables it to be excreted from the body. A generous 15-gram serve of freeze-dried açaí powder (equivalent to about three tablespoons) provides 4.2 grams of fibre, so simply adding acai to your breakfast cereal could significantly boost your daily fibre intake. In fact, depending on the type of cereal you choose, adding acai could literally double the fibre content of your breakfast!

Acai berries are also packed full of antioxidants, especially the anthocyanins and proanthocyanidins that are also found in red wine, blueberries and other dark red and purple fruit and vegetables. But açaí berries contain far more significant quantities of these precious antioxidants than almost any other food. For example, that 15-gram serve of freeze-dried açaí that you added to your breakfast contains approximately the same amount of antioxidants as 360 blueberries.

As you probably know, antioxidants help to offset the effects of free radical damage in the human body. That’s important for cholesterol management, because cholesterol molecules are particularly susceptible to free radicals, which appear to magnify their ability to damage blood vessels and consequently increase the risk of heart and blood vessel disease.

One of the most important aspects of managing your cholesterol is to minimise the amount of red meat, full-cream dairy foods and other saturated fat and cholesterol-containing foods in your diet. At the same time, it’s recommended that you increase your consumption of heart-healthy oils, such as the monounsaturated fatty acids found in olive oil and avocados. The Acai berry can help here too, adding more than 5 grams of monounsaturated fatty acids to your daily intake for every 15 grams of the freeze-dried berries you consume.

Taken together, all these nutritional attributes of acaiberries suggest that that their traditional reputation as a heart-protecting food in their native Brazil is well founded. Time will tell whether adding them to your diet every day does turn out to help manage your cholesterol levels, but since they’re so delicious there’s absolutely no reason to delay adding acai berries to the menu today!

Jayne Tancred – Freelance Journalist, Naturopath Herbalist Nutritionist,