Amazon Fruit Supports Heart Health

The vibrantly purple acai berry (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) is harvested from acai palm trees, which are native to the rainforests of South America.  The acai berry is potent in antioxidants, amino acids, and essential fatty acids.  G. Zapata-Sudo, from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and colleagues report that extracts from the seeds of acai berries may exert a protective effect for the heart against exercise intolerance and dysfunction, as suggested by a lab animal model.  The researchers completed a running exercise with rats subjected to myocardial infarction, with the animals covering an average distance of 178 meters. The team also supplemented a subset of the animals’ diets with acai berry extract, and those animals ran a significantly greater distance – to 970 meters.  The acai seed extract also associated with improvements in systolic blood pressure (which was adversely affected following myocardial infarction). The study authors report that: “Euterpe oleracea treatment of [myocardial infarction] rats prevented the development of exercise intolerance, cardiac hypertrophy, fibrosis, and dysfunction.”