If you've been swilling pomegranate juice, hoping to reap all the cancer-, obesity- and wrinkle-fighting benefits of antioxidants, there may be a new drink in town for you.

Amazonian acai is gaining popularity with the health-food crowd.

Acai Pics | Berry Benefits | Super Foods

Antioxidants help the body get rid of free radicals. The body produces free radicals when it digests food, metabolizes medicine and fights disease, so they are necessary parts of the human condition, but a buildup can damage the body. Antioxidants and are credited with preventing coronary artery disease, some cancers, macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease, and some arthritis-related conditions. according to WebMD.com.

Pomegranates, blueberries -- even wine, chocolate and coffee -- contain high levels of antioxidants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture measures those levels with something called an ORAC score -- Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity.

Acai berries have nearly eight times higher ORAC scores than pomegranate, which is near the top of published charts. But fewer stores stock acai juice than those curvaceous bottles of Pom, so where are you going to get it? At No Name Nutrition supermarket in Omaha, Neb., Todd Hurley offers a variety of acai products, from boxed juice to pills, powders and liquid supplements at prices from $2.35 for the single-serving juice box to $38 for a month's supply of supplements.

Acai berries grow at the top of palm trees in Amazonian Brazil. The purple berry with a significant pit has been made into pulp and eaten by the natives for millennia. But it is only beginning to become known to the American consumer, desperate for ways to stave off aging and early death.

Gallons A Day?

After 33 years in business, Hurley has been offering the acai products for about five years, and he points them out to customers who are looking for antioxidants. He said the jury is still out on acai, but it shows promise -- as long as people are careful about promises they read on the Internet.

"Most of the hype is best-case scenario with someone drinking a gallon a day," Hurley said.

In fact, Internet claims about the berry range from weight loss to improved libido to wart removal. Just a few of those claims have been proven in laboratories, and even fewer in human trials.

Human trials are paramount because of the nature of the gut, unique to each of us and inhospitable to many compounds. So trials that show something works in the lab doesn't always prove true once ingested.

For instance, a University of Florida study showed that acai has components able to inhibit the growth of leukemia cells in the lab, but those results haven't been shown in animal or human trials, or replicated by others.

Alexander G. Schauss, PhD, has been studying the berries for more than a decade. He recently presented findings at an international symposium on the health benefits of fruits and vegetables from a series of human trials that used a retail acai juice called Mona-Vie..

He said that more than 80 percent of people were able to get antioxidants into their cells, and that more than 90 percent showed evidence that they were reducing the effects of cholesterol.

Schauss said that in study after study over 11 years, both in petrie dishes and humans, his results kept coming back off the charts. Acai is slowly revealing itself to be a nearly perfect fruit, from its low sugar content, to high fiber and remarkably high levels of the "good" fat, called monosaturated fats.

"Wow, it's exactly the kind of food the human body wants to eat all the time," Schauss said.

Is It A 'Superfood'?

Dr. Nicholas Perricone appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2005 and put acai at the top of his 10 super foods list.

Omaha registered dietitian and clinical herbalist Nicholas Schnell said he agrees that acai is an incredible food, but he said that because it is relatively hard to get, he doesn't promote it much to clients.

"You can't go to the store and eat acai as a food. There are tons of other super foods you can do that with and they are cheap. Beets, blueberries, cherries, pomegrante, blackberries, carrots, etc., are all super foods. To me, a super food has to be readily available to consumers at the grocery store at a reasonable price," Schnell said.

Schauss said because acai decays so fast once it falls from the palm tree, Americans won’t be seeing fresh berries in the marketplace any time soon.

There are many ways to get acai out of the jungle, but Schauss said consumers should look for products that use berries that were freeze-dried in the Amazon, since it preserves all of its beneficial attributes. Other preservation methods, such as spray drying, don’t preserve very much of the benefits of the fresh berry, and therefore you may not get what you paid for, Schauss said.

That's another reason Schnell is less than bullish on acai.

"All of the traditional healing uses and use by indigenous tribes has been exclusively with the fresh berry only, used within 24 hours. Science has to prove other methods are better than 2,000 years of well-documented historical use," Schnell said. "If companies are going to market it in a new form, such as freeze-dried powder or fresh-frozen concentrate juice, they have to do the research that its antioxidant levels are not altered and its medicinal uses are still applicable."

As the science stands now, the experts said, consumers can safely add acai to their diets to boost overall health, but don't expect specific results. Other Links:

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