What I’m drinking now: Acai juice
I have to admit I didn’t really cook anything interesting last week, but writing about acai berries yesterday got me interested in trying out the super juice for myself.
At my local natural foods store I found a lot of juice blends that contained acai, often in combination with other fruit juices, caffeine and herbs. I found two juices that listed acai as the first ingredient and didn’t have a lot of extra stuff in them, so I decided to give them a try.
Sambazon Acai Smoothie
Because I wasn’t sure what acai tastes like or if I would like the flavor (it’s often described as being similar to a blueberry or a cross between a berry and a grape) I decided to start with a more aggressively flavored product, in this case a strawberry flavored smoothie from Sambazon.
The product is 95 percent juice, including acai, apple, green cane, banana and strawberry juices. The juice itself is brownish red, kind of like natural raspberry juice, and it smells fruity.
The predominant flavor in this drink is strawberry, but on further drinking there is a bit of a deeper flavor there that I assume is the acai but is hard to define or describe. It’s good.
I find the drink refreshing and sweet (there are 30 grams of sugar per 8 ounce serving and the bottle holds 10.5 ounces). I would drink it again, though it is sort of a rich way to get your antioxidants, with 160 calories, 3 grams of fat and 0.5 grams saturated fat in 8 ounces.
But there are also 30 milligrams of omega 3s, 25 milligrams of omega 6s and 1,350 milligrams of omega 9s, plus 3 percent of the recommended amount of potassium, 33 grams of carbs and 2 grams of fiber.
The bottle says 120 acai berries go into each bottle, and reminds that the fruit has twice the antioxidant power of blueberries. It also notes the berries are sustainably harvested.
Bossa Nova Acai Juice
The next juice I tried, Bossa Nova Acai Jucie, has a much simpler ingredient list, just acai juice (”wild harvested”), organic agave nectar, natural flavors and citric acid. This one is a much richer purple and thinner than the other juice.
It smells a bit like grapes, and again that hard to define, deep fruitiness I noted in tasting the smoothie. This one definitely tastes different. There’s an initial fruitiness that ultimately turns into something almost bitter, or at least not the traditional sweet we Americans associate with fruit juice.
That isn’t to say there isn’t sugar in this one; it has 19 grams per 8 ounces and the bottle is 10 ounces. It also packs 95 calories, no fat or fiber and 18 percent of your vitamin A for the day.
Drinking this one feels a lot more like taking medicine than the other one did. I assume that’s because there’s more of the actual fruit juice in this one, though the label makes no claims about how many berries were involved in the making of this bottle.
After my first sip I don’t really want to take another drink, but I do. Not allowing it to linger in my mouth makes the flavor a little more palatable, but I still can’t bring myself to finish the bottle. I can see that it might take some practice to make this part of your daily routine, but I assume you’d get used to the flavor if you drank it long enough and were seeing some health benefits that made you want to keep drinking.
As for me, I think I’ll let this trend pass, but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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