There are hundreds of different types of popular foods that people push as miracle foods for your health, but there are a smaller number of foods that seem to go relatively unnoticed. If you’ve never heard of the maqui berry, that’s probably because it’s a somewhat rare fruit from South America.
For hundreds of years, the Mapuche people have used the berry for it’s amazing effects. Today, maqui berries are also sold in other forms such as pills and powders for use as supplements. Here we will explore the benefits and some of the ways it can help you achieve better health.
The maqui berry is extremely high in antioxidants called anthocyanins, which means that it can be very beneficial to consume in order to better your health. Antioxidants can help you to stay young, protect from cancer, and can relieve certain types of stresses on the body, which allows it to heal and regenerate.
It even can protect you on a cellular level, because it protects the body from damage to DNA, which is essential because your body needs to be able to read correct DNA information to know how to build your newly created cells properly. Poorly built cells lead to premature aging and skin disorders.
How to Use Maqui
This wonderful fruit can be used in a variety of ways. You can add maqui to your smoothies to beef up on the antioxidant power of your breakfast, or you can choose to buy it in a powdered form so you can add it to all sorts of blended delights like breakfast cereals and meal replacement shakes.
If you want to get extra ambitious, you can even use it to sweeten certain sauces without changing the flavor much. One thing for certain is that you will be doing yourself a huge favor by making maqui part of your diet.
What follows is a more detailed explanation of the benefits of and ways to use maqui berry.
Some Concerns
While maqui is entirely natural and there are very few things that can be done to make it dangerous, it should be noted that taking maqui with certain types of medications like diabetes medications can lower your blood sugar to the point where the body could experience some ill effects.
It would be best to consult a medical professional about maqui, and have them monitor your reactions and changes in your blood. A small amount of preparation and care will make sure that your experience with maqui stay safe and beneficial.
Health Benefits of Maqui Berry
You’ve probably heard the term “superfood” many times over the last decade or so. People everywhere are looking for a magic bullet, or a magic cure that they can ingest that will bring them health, and prosperity, but do foods like that really exist?
Science has shown people that while these superfoods can’t cure everything instantly, they do possess unique and powerful benefits that can change lives for the better by fending off disease, or giving you relief from the troublesome symptoms of a lifelong disorder. The next few paragraphs will be exploring the health benefits of maqui berry.
Blood Sugar Control
For people who suffer from diabetes, controlling the blood sugar is a serious and important issue. Some foods can cause the blood sugar levels to rise or fall very rapidly. These major and sudden changes can contribute heavily to damage and stress on various organs of the body.
These sudden spikes and dips in blood sugar levels can also affect the brain that result in malfunctions of the body that can cause coma – and even death. Maqui berries help the body to stabilize these fluctuations and make sure that they are more gradual and controlled.
It Fights Inflammation
Swelling or inflammation of the organs, muscles, or joints can be a major issue for many people. There are a surprising number of illnesses that stem from inflammation, or are exacerbated by inflammation, so it stands to reason that making efforts to reduce inflammation can help exacerbate some conditions.
Maqui berry is a very powerful antioxidant. In the past, indigenous people used it to reduce swelling and soothe conditions like arthritis effects and symptoms related to inflammation.
Lowers Cholesterol
Cholesterol is really a more specific term for the fat that floats freely in the blood stream. This cholesterol is made up of whatever kind of fats that you’ve been ingesting. When there is a heavy concentration of bad fats in the bloodstream, this can cause blockages that leads to serious events like strokes of heart attacks.
Maqui berry and other berries like it have the ability to attract and carry these fats away to disposal sites in the body through the lymph system. When this type of fat is taken out of the body, arteries are able to function more efficiently, which ensures that organs like the heart and brain will be appropriately fed with the nutrients they need.
Three Forms of Maqui Berry
The maqui berry is one of the newest in the recently discovered South American fruits. Due to research over the last few years, science has been able to establish the nutritional and even medicinal value of those mysterious fruit, with it now rivaling the discovery of previous superfruit – acai.
As the demand for maqui grows, innovations in how maqui is taken or added to food has occurred. These new forms of maqui beneficially contribute to the convenience of use and, therefore, the versatility of maqui.
Pill Supplements
It’s quite possible that the pill form is the most common and easily consumed of the forms of maqui, especially because people have become accustomed to taking pill supplements on a daily basis. This form is relatively self-explanatory, because all of taking a pill requires nothing but water or juice to swallow it with.
Capsules and tablets can be ordered online, and may be found in health food stores in most areas. Price and content may vary, as supplements aren’t as heavily regulated, so you need to do some research to make sure that you have an authentic and safe product.
Powder
One very popular way to add some nutritional value is often in the powder form. Protein and nutrition shakes have employed the powder delivery system for several decades and remains a part of the popular consciousness. This can be a great option for people who would like to make shakes and smoothies with maqui berry, but don’t have access to the fresh fruit.
This makes it accessible while keeping the company and consumer from experiencing the loss that would occur in transporting the fresh fruit across long distances.
Extract
Another timely and consistently reliable way to add some benefits to your food and drinks is through extracts. Extracts typically have a much longer shelf life and retain potency. They require smaller dosages and can bring health benefits to you without much effort. All you need to do is open the container and dispense it.
Be aware that heating can degrade the quality and potency of the extract, so it is better to put it into cold or room temperature food or beverages. (Or, you can do what I do and drop it directly in to your mouth followed by a swig of juice or water!)
Ways to Use Maqui Berry
Maqui berry is a superfood that has been used for hundreds of years in ceremonies and to promote health. With the leaps and bounds made by modern science, we can now see the true benefit of this wonderful fruit from nature.
Traditionally, most people simply ate the fruit but, in this day and era, enterprising people have created lots of ingenious ways to avail themselves of the richness of health that these berries provide. The next few paragraphs will explore a few ways to use maqui berries.
Eating It
One of the best ways to get the benefits from a fruit is to simply eat it. This is usually the case because a whole fruit is likely to contain many of its best attributes when it’s eaten with the skin and flesh. You can always make yourself a nice fruit salad and eat it with a spoon.
Fruit salads are great and give you a fresh way to eat a group of awesome fruit together. It’s also never a bad idea to sneak some mild veggies into the mix, so if you want to really make it easy you can toss some awesome arrangement of healthy stuff into a blender with the maqui and you’ll have a power packed smoothie.
Juicing It
Juicing has become a very popular way to eat plant-based foods. It gives you faster access to the benefits of their favorite fruits and vegetables, and can soften the distaste for certain vegetables. The only issue with juicing is that it’s very likely to waste some important parts of the vegetables and leave you with only a portion of the most beneficial nutrients, so you may still have to use supplements in order to get all of your vitamin and mineral requirements.
Supplements
Today, many superfoods come in a pill form that can be taken very easily in nearly any situation. Powder, tablet and capsule forms of maqui berry can be found available at natural food retailers and on online stores, and you can choose from a wide variety of supplements to suit your needs.
Just be sure to do your due diligence to protect yourself from companies that use lots of fillers instead of the proper product. Look for certified organic products because they are more likely to be the real stuff.
Maqui vs. Acai Berry
Sometime in the late 1990s, a berry of exotic distinction became a buzzword that caused a paradigm shift in the world of superfruits. acai was suddenly the forefront as the most popular juice in the market at the time, and its distribution made it a staple in households around the world, but nearly thirty years later, how does acai stack up against the newly discovered maqui berry?
Below you will find more information about these two formidable fruits and a basic comparison of how they stack up against each other in terms of nutrition and usefulness.
Nutrition Content
In terms of nutrition, the acai berry and maqui are in the same family and therefore share many of the nutritional aspects of each other, yet maqui does have a few minerals in greater supply such as iron, potassium, and calcium, making it great for the repair of many of the major systems of the body.
Both fruits contain large portions of C and A, but acai has a higher amount of vitamin E, which could be considered to be one of the primary building blocks needed for skin vitality and elasticity of various tissues.
Antioxidants
Both acai and maqui fruit are heavy on antioxidants which are great for fighting the different types of oxidative stress that are placed upon the body during daily life. This, in turn, helps to slow the effects of aging.
One of the primary things that antioxidants are known for though, are their abilities to fight cellular problems and cancer by eliminating free radicals that cause damage to the DNA information stored in your cells. Those unforeseen mutations often manifest in disease and other problems.
Accessibility
One of the main reasons for the outrageous success of acai early on, was its accessibility. When it was introduced through marketing efforts, the proper channels for distribution were firmly in place, making it an easy sell to the public, and placed it directly into the hands of the consumers who were ready to welcome this new fruit and the health benefits that it contains.
Today, the maqui berry is on the scene with a little bit more to offer, but the main challenge of maqui will be the limited amount of sources for the fruit, and until it reaches the accessibility of acai, it will remain a specialty fruit that is harder to find. However, convenient supplement forms – powder, tablets, and capsules are readily available.
