What are Maqui Berries?
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Everyone’s talking about the health benefits of maqui berry but what are maqui berries? It’s certainly not one of the more common berries that we find in supermarkets. In fact, many people have not even heard about this particular type of berry.
So what exactly is maqui berry?
Maqui berries are a relatively rare fruit indigenous to South America. The native Mapuche people recognized the health benefits of maqui berries early on and have been using them for hundreds of years for their amazing effects.
Maqui berries are small, round, and purple-black in color. They look like a darker version of blueberries and are often mistaken for them.
The fruit is quite delicate and tends to get bruised easily, which makes it difficult to transport from the place of origin to markets around the world. This is one of the main reasons you do not see the fresh fruit in supermarkets.
However, you can find maqui berry in the form of a powder, supplement or extract.
Health Benefits of Maqui Berry
Maqui berries are extremely high in antioxidants called anthocyanins, which offer protection from cancer. They also relieve certain types of stresses on the body, which allows it to heal faster.
Here are some of the top health benefits of maqui berry:
Helps Control Blood Sugar
Some foods can cause 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.
Uncontrolled blood sugar can lead to diabetes, which can then cause several different complications.
Maqui berries help the body to stabilize these changes and make sure that they are more gradual and controlled.
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. Taking steps to reduce inflammation can help to alleviate the severity of the symptoms in certain conditions.
Maqui berry has been proven to reduce swelling and soothe the symptoms of arthritis and other conditions related to inflammation.
Lowers Cholesterol
Cholesterol is really a more specific term for the fat that floats freely in the bloodstream. When there is a heavy concentration of bad fats in the bloodstream, this can cause blockages that lead to serious complications such as strokes and heart attacks.
Maqui berries 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 flushed out from the body, arteries can function more efficiently, which ensures that the appropriate nutrients reach organs such as the heart and brains in sufficient quantities.
3 Forms of Maqui Berry
The different forms of maqui contribute heavily to the convenience of use, and the versatility of the fruit. All forms give you the same benefits so you can choose any one depending on your needs and your personal preference.
Regardless of whether you choose to use maqui berry powder, pills or extract, one thing for sure is that you will be doing your health a huge favor by making this fruit part of your diet.
Maqui Berry Powder
You can add maqui berry powder to your smoothies to beef up on the antioxidant power of your breakfast, or can add it to all sorts of blended delights, from breakfast cereals to meal replacement shakes.
Adding a teaspoon of maqui berry powder will sweeten cooking sauces without changing the flavor majorly.
You can buy maqui berry powder from any supermarket or grocery store but chances are you will find a limited selection to choose from. The best place to buy maqui berry is online at Amazon where you will be able to choose from a variety of brands.
Maqui Berry Extract
Another way to add some benefits of this fruit to your food and drinks is by using maqui berry extracts.
Extracts typically have a much longer shelf life and retain their potency for longer. They require smaller dosages and can bring massive amounts of health benefits to a variety of foods in many different ways. All you need to do is open the container and pour it into whatever you are planning to ingest that day.
Caution: Heating maqui berry extract can degrade the quality and potency. To get the full health benefits of maqui berry extract, it is better to add it to raw foods or add it to cooked foods just before serving.
Maqui Berry Pill Supplement
It’s quite possible that the pill form is the most common form of maqui, especially because people have become accustomed to taking various pill supplements on a daily basis.
Maqui berry pill supplements can be found in specialty stores in most areas. The easiest way is to shop online. 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 something that is an authentic and safe product.
When you order maqui berry pill supplements online from Amazon, you get the benefits of an authentic product at a competitive price.
3 Ways to Use Maqui Berry
In places where it is found in abundance in nature, people simply eat the fresh fruits, but because it cannot be transported easily, to engineer lots of ingenious ways to avail themselves of the richness in health that these berries provide. The next few paragraphs will be exploring 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 nutrients when it’s eaten in total, including 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 the plant based foods that people eat. It gives a lot of people 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
Vitamins, so you may still have to use supplemental additions to your juice to make up for what was lost.
Pill Forms
In this modern day, many drugs and supplements now come in a pill form that can be taken very easily in nearly any situation. Pill forms of maqui berry can be found available in online stores, and you can choose from a wide variety of pills 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.
You will get a more detailed explanation of ways to use maqui berry below.
Small 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.
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? If you continue reading the next few paragraphs, you’ll find some information about these two formidable fruits and a very basic comparison of how they stack up against each other in terms of 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 could even help to slow the effects of aging in some ways. 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 flavor with eager and open arms.
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.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to serve as medical advice. Please consult your doctor before using any natural medication or if you experience any unusual symptoms. See Full Disclaimer here.