Like To Eat French Fries? Better Wash It Down With Some Acai

By now we all know that a diet very high in fatty foods is bad for us, but we also know that some of those fatty foods taste really good! Well, it looks like taking Acai may actually help counteract some of the negatives associated with fatty food!

New Study Shows Acai Helps Make a High Fat Diet… Not So Terrible

A study just published in the December 2009 Journal of Nutrition found that rats feed a high fat diet AND acai pulp, had lower levels of total Cholesterol and LDL Cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) then rats who just ate a high fat diet.

“This is the first study, to our knowledge, addressing the potential benefits of açai intake in the cholesterol profile,” wrote the researchers, led by Maria Lucia Pedrosa from the Federal University of Ouro Preto.

“We observed that the addition of açai pulp in the hypercholesterolemic diet had a hypocholesterolemic effect by reducing cholesterol levels (total and non-HDL), which could be explained by a lower food intake and higher faecal excretion,” they added.

How Does Acai Help Reduce Cholesterol Levels?

The study just looked at end results – it did not try to answer how Acai might have achieved its positive results. To be honest the results do not surprise us, we have been talking about the health benefits of Acai for a few years now. Our theory is that Acai is a powerful antioxidant and thus it can stop cholesterol from oxidizing and becoming the very dangerous oxidized LDL Cholesterol. We wrote a whole article on fruits and oxidized LDL cholesterol, that you can read here.

But What If I Am Not a Rat?

Our most recent survey indicates that, surprisingly, the vast majority of our readers are actually not rats. So, since the study was done with rats – what can we humans take from it? Rat studies are a good first step in understanding how something like Acai may work in our body. Often what we find true in rats is also true in humans – but not always.

The only way to confirm the findings of this study are to do human clinical trials with Acai and a high fat diet. Until those studies are done, there will be debate on whether Acai can really reduce LDL cholesterol in humans with a high fat diet.

So, if you are taking Acai now, we would not recommend loading up on fatty foods and hoping the Acai balances things out. However, if you are not taking Acai now, but are eating a high fat diet, and just can’t stop – now might be a good time to look into some high quality Acai Supplements.

Additional Resources:

Diet supplementation with acai (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) pulp improves biomarkers of oxidative stress and the serum lipid profile in rats. Journal of Nutrition, Published online 21 December 2009.

Tagged as: acai, acai berry, Cholesterol