Acai Berry

By Xavier Fox

Spending time in the gym each day banging the iron sure makes you look great. Enlarged and separated muscles with snake-like veins running through them force people to take notice when you walk into the room. However, as good as it makes you look, crushing your muscles with massive amounts of weight for hundreds of reps every day wears and tears on your body. You have to know how to minimize the damage so that you can achieve continual improvement.

Two of the most inhibiting characteristics of the wear and tear of weight lifting are inflammation and the creation of free radicals which can potentially cause a great deal of damage in your body. Inflammation of the muscles and joints can cause nerves to become pinched, severe pain, and even arthritis. All of these things will definitely put a damper on your training sessions, and they could keep you out of the gym altogether. When joints are inflamed they can cause excessive pressure on cartilage that causes the cartilage to prematurely wear, and once it is unable to protect the bones from friction, arthritis occurs.
Free radicals are kind of the natural by-products of your own metabolism. They are also created during times of stress which includes the stress that resistance training puts on your body. Free radical damage that is done to tissues within the body is known as oxidative stress. Free radicals can end up disrupting the behaviour of the entire cell, because they steal electrons from the nucleic acids, proteins, or enzymes. Like the molecules the cell itself loses its ability to stabilize. This is especially damaging when it occurs within the mitochondria and the DNA. The mitochondria are the main suppliers for energy in the muscle, so if their structure is altered, they will no longer be able to be an effective energy source. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia will result if this process is permitted to maintain itself. If the DNA is altered and not functioning the way it should, then the body cannot carry the genetic information necessary for cell functions, including making the proteins needed for cell maintenance and repair. If your system cannot properly produce proteins, then you will not be able to effectively repair and grow muscle tissue. Your ability to train and repair muscle tissue will go down the crapper.
Ok… now that I have spent a couple of minutes making you feel uncomfortable about the things that resistance training can do to your body, we’ll spend the rest of the article concentrating on a supplement that will help to inhibit inflammation and free radicals. The nutrient we will be discussing is called Acai. This fruit, which is about the size of a grape, is something that has been used in Brazil for many decades. It has powerful antioxidant capabilities, and it also contains essential omega fatty acids, phytonutrients, fibre, vitamins and minerals. It can help to combat the negative side effects of intense resistance training so that you can stay in the path to building huge and powerful muscles.
Combating free radicals with antioxidants is an important part of any bodybuilders supplement program. With all of the intense training a bodybuilding puts themselves through, they really accelerate the amount of free radicals that their body produces. Therefore, they need to find a way to know if they are getting enough antioxidants, and if the ones they are taking are effective. It’s a good thing we have science out there, because scientist Dr. Guohua Cao found a method to determine a nutrients ability to act as an antioxidant. He developed a procedure that analyses foods and gives them an Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) score. If a food has a high ORAC score, then it means the food is high in antioxidants, so it will be more effective. It is important to use scores of nutrients that have been tested by themselves with no other additives. This is because substances can be added together to improve scores. In a major study on fruit and vegetable antioxidant content published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Acai berries were found to be superior in the amount of antioxidant per pound. It is also important to find bioavailability tests done on the products you will purchase to ensure the form of Acai they produce can be absorbed by the body.
Obviously, different types of fruit and vegetables have different ORAC scores. If you followed the USRDA of five servings of fruit and vegetables you would score about 1,750 units on average. However, depending on which combinations you choose, it would be easy to fluctuate daily between 1,300 ORAC units and 6,000 ORAC units. The average person would normally need around 5,000 ORAC units per day to get enough antioxidants. To get an idea of the antioxidant capability of Acai berries, they score a 50,000 on the ORAC scale compared to apples which score 218, bananas score 221, and blueberries score 2,400.
One of the greatest benefits the Acai berry has to offer is the Anthocyanins (a class of flavonoid) that are in them. It is amazing how chemicals in nature that are used for one purpose can offer a completely separate benefit. Anthocyanins are pigments that plants use as a shield against the ultraviolet radiation of sunlight, bacteria, viruses, fungi and oxidative reactions. They are the valued antioxidant plant chemicals, providing the plant a way of protecting its seeds against oxidative radicals produced during photosynthesis and exposure to sun and pests. These pigments are also a way to attracting pollinators so the plant can reproduce, and animals so they will eat the Acai berry and scatter seeds (by defecation) for germination elsewhere.
Well… these anthocyanins are also extremely beneficial to bodybuilders, and since bodybuilders aim to grow like weeds, it is only fitting. Anthocyanins and polyphenols in the Acai berry have shown to be a very powerful and effective antioxidant when ingested, especially leading the fight against superoxide (SOD) and peroxyl radicals. Antioxidants are compounds that have the ability to donate an electron from their outer shell without becoming unstable and changing their characteristics. This enables them to neutralize free radicals and stop the potential chain reaction of free radical production, which can lead to cell damage. Therefore, the cells within your body are left to perform their intended duties, and your mitochondria will be spared so they can produce much needed energy to help you blast through your workouts.
Awesome thing number two that the Acai berry does is inhibiting cyclooxygenase enzymes COX-1 and COX-2. These two enzymes are responsible for acute and chronic inflammation within the body. Many of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) on the market have been developed specifically to combat COX-1 and COX-2. However, some NSAID medications have side effects such as kidney and liver problems, and they also can cause ulcers. Inflammation will inhibit your workouts, but trading inflammation for ulcers, and kidney or liver problems, will probably not make your workouts any better. Acai is a naturally occurring nutrient that has not shown any negative side effects. Consuming Acai berry, or Acai berry based supplements, can help to keep inflammation minimal, which will keep your gains optimal and you won’t have to exchange the beneficial properties of Acai for negative side effects.
As part of its anti-inflammatory capability, the Acai berry has also been shown to increase production of white blood cells that remove damaged cells from the body (macrophages). It also inhibited the production of nitric oxide that had been induced by the potent inflammatory inducer lipopolysaccharide (LPS). As higher concentrations of Acai were ingested, more and more nitric oxide was inhibited to show Acai’s anti-inflammatory ability. A study performed at the University of Florida showed that the polyphenols contained in Acai could actually reduce production of leukaemia cells and combat gastrointestinal problems.
Anthocyanins will aid in fighting high blood pressure and the accumulation of cholesterol. By being able to inhibit the oxidation of LDL (bad cholesterol), anthocyanins combat the build up of plaque to allow blood to flow more freely and carry much needed oxygen and nutrients into the muscles as well as carry wastes away from them.
The best from of Acai is the freeze-dried fruit pulp. Heating the berries in order to process them can destroy many of the nutrients. A mere 100g (3.5 ounces) of Acai powder contains 52g of carbohydrates, with 44 of those grams being attributed to fibre (more than the USDA recommended daily allowance). Fibre can aid in the prevention of heart disease by lowering cholesterol, reduce high vascular tension in people having diets low in protein, soothe and protect the throat and the entire digestive tract (which helps to guard against bacteria entering through the mucous membranes), and it can safely soothe sensitive stomachs and irritated intestinal linings as well as aid in the gentle cleansing of toxins and other accumulations in the colon. Some forms of fibre have shown to help the body stabilize blood sugar levels.
Also, 3.5 ounces of Acai powder will also provide 8.1 grams of protein and is loaded with healthy essential fatty acids. More than half of the fat that Acai contains is the monounsaturated fat oleic acid which has shown to lower serum cholesterol levels. It also has relatively large amounts of the omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid. Omega-6 fatty acids lower both LDL and HDL serum cholesterol, aid in producing the hormones that control muscle contractions, blood vessel constriction and relaxation, and immune system operation. This same serving size also contains 260mg of calcium, 4.4mg of iron, and 1002 IU of vitamin A.
Acai berries and Acai supplements can be a useful tool in your bodybuilding program. They are one of the most powerful antioxidants in the fruit family, so they can combat free radicals and the damage caused by them. In addition, they soothe inflammation to keep you healthy and free of pain when you are trying to add on slabs of pure muscle in the gym. Acai also helps to keep cholesterol levels down, which aids in overall health and nutrient transportation.
So give Acai a try… what do you have to lose, besides size and strength?