The acai berry is a fruit that grows naturally in Brazil. The locals have used it for many years and have included it in many of their every day foods and drinks. They use it as flavoring for ice cream, mix it into fruit smoothies, and even create acai berry tapioca. The reason they use it so much has to do with its taste, but also involves its incredible health benefits that come along with it. If the Brazilians love it so much, you might be wondering “How can acai berry benefit me?”

You’ve probably seen the hundreds of ads that talk about the acai berry benefit towards weight loss. Oprah talked about it on her show, infomercials spend an hour every night dancing around what the product actually does, and web pages all over the internet are trying to get you to try their product free. Still, they rarely go into the specific benefits that the acai berry has, mostly because a lot of these products don’t work.

The acai berry itself has a lot of nutritional value, but when products only contain a small portion of the acai berry, benefit may not be a word used to describe the product in any way. Some of these pills and powders will use different parts of the plant as opposed to the actual fruit. Roots and seeds have no nutritional content when it comes to the acai plant, so these products don’t actually have anything helpful in them. They usually just fill up their product with other herbal extract such as green tea and ginseng, stuff you could get for half the price in any generic over the counter supplement.

Some of these companies will put the acai berry fruit in them, but they have such a small percentage that it doesn’t actually do any good. These companies can advertise, legally, that they have acai in their products and label them as acai something or other despite the products not having enough in them to give you the benefits you want.

There are legitimate acai products on the market that have the acai berry benefit that so many celebrities are talking about. The way to tell is that they will advertise a high ratio of acai berry fruit to other ingredients. Some companies may even sell pure concentrated juice, although that can get very expensive. Alternatively, eating some of the same acai berry foods mixtures that are popular in Brazil may be enough to start seeing the benefits. Fruit smoothies and granola mixes are healthy and a great way to include acai berries in your diet.