Dr. Alex Schauss, ORAC, and Freeze-Dried Acai

I would like to thank Scott for passing on Dr. Alex Schauss’ presentation of freeze-dried acai:

I was initially quite excited that freeze-dried acai could scientifically be proven to have far greater ORAC scores than other berries. Perhaps it is the scientific break-through that he claims it to be. To review, here’s what Alex Schauss says:

I would have needed another three screens to the right of my computer to let that arrow accurately define it’s difference compared to freeze-dried samples of other foods that we looked at – that the USDA looked at. It was off the chart.(Timestamp of 2:23)

The bold emphasis there is mine. There’s also this:

again you can see the high bar that is acai and all of these others which are moisture equivalent and they are also freeze-dried samples. So you can there is a vast difference between the two. So Gram to gram… (Timestamp of 3:43)

I had always contended that Schauss was measuring two different things: one freeze-dried acai… the other typical berries. This would be a troubling comparison because most everyone knows that water makes up 90% of fruit. If you take the water out of acai you can get 10x more ORAC score if you are measuring “gram to gram” of something that still has 90% of it’s water. As such, I always thought that we needed a fair test, one that is moisture equivalent as he states. And now that we have it, let’s celebrate the freeze-dried acai berry, right?

Unfortunately, we can’t break out the party hats yet. My friend Vogel as usual digs up the hard evidence to discount that information, noting the following:

• The bar chart falsely quotes one of Schauss’ studies [J Agric Food Chem. 2006;54(22):8604-10] as the source of this data, when in fact his study did not report the ORAC values of other fruits.
• Schauss says, From our results the H-ORAC of freeze-dried acai was 996.9 umol TE/g, which is significantly higher than that of most dark colored berry or any fruit or vegetable tested to date when appropriately converting fresh weight to dry weights(14).
• Reference #14 in the previous bullet point was a study listed the ORAC values for various non-freeze-dried fruits published by Wu et al. [J Agric Food Chem. 2004;52:4026-37].
• The H-ORAC values for “full moisture” cranberry and blueberry listed in the Wu article are about 92 per gram
• Since we know that 90% of the weight of full moisture berries is water, we would need to multiply the cranberry and blueberry by 10 to get their freeze-dried ORAC score.
• That gives us 996.9 umol TE/g for acai vs. 920 umol TE/g for blueberry cranberry. Dr. Alex Schauss didn’t seem to convert for wet vs. dry very well. Acai still wins, but by less than 10% – clearly not the “three computer screens” that Dr. Alex Schauss says suggests.

This victory for minor victory for freeze-dried acai is short-lived… the paper goes on to say:

Contradictorily and surprisingly, the contents of anthocyanins, proanthocyanadins, and other polyphenol compounds in this freeze-dried product were found to be much lower than those found in blueberry or other berries with elevated H-ORAC values. To make things even more confusing, the total phenolics in acai was found to be only 13.9 mg/g GAE

The interesting thing to me is that this is exactly what Men’s Journal said about MonaVie, “[MonaVie Active] tested extremely low in anthocyanins and phenolics… even apple juice (which also tested poorly) has more phenolics…”

Now is a good time to mention that freeze-dried acai and MonaVie are not one in the same. Most distributors will talk about freeze-dried acai, and then hand you a bottle of MonaVie as if it’s the same thing. We know the ORAC scores on MonaVie from other AIMBR tests and that’s not any prettier.

Originally posted 2009-09-17 13:54:26.

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