Acai Berry and MonaVie

Acai Berry and MonaVie
There are several people in Bowling Green selling MonaVie - here is another perspective:

Unless you've been under a rock, you've probably heard of the Acai Berry (pronounced AH-sci-EE). This little Brazilian berry has been on Oprah, all the major morning shows, magazines, etc. Touted as the best antioxidant, apparently it's nothing short of a miracle.

The acai berry grows in the Amazon Rain Forest and tastes like a berry with a chocolate aftertaste. Sounds fabulous! It even beats the blueberry in its antioxidant properties.

[BUT]

Be forewarned -- as good as this little berry is, it will not reverse aging and cure diseases! I've seen press releases with those words in the title. When you go to the website, it's just a front for another website that sells the product - but you won't see that claim on THEIR website.

It wasn't until a friend of mine started taking MonaVie and told me how much he was paying for it that I decided to explore it further.

$39 a bottle ($25 with a bulk purchase) - and a bottle only lasts about a week! No joking! Not only that, MonaVie is basically an MLM (multi level marketing) product.

So the quest was on. Find out what I could about this "miracle antioxidant" and see if other quality products are available for less.

I found a site that gives a pretty good detailed description of what it is and what it does. Granted, they are selling a product, but they also give great non-technical information. You can get information from the link at the end of this article.

What Are Some of the Different Acai Berry Products?

You can purchase it in various formats, but the primary 3 types are in juices, powders, and freeze-dried capsules.

JUICE

MonaVie comes in juice format and has to be refrigerated. Their acai juice is really a blend of 19 different fruits. There's no way of knowing precisely how much acai berry is in their formula.

If you like the juice blend, I've discovered another product for about half the price. If you scroll down their sales page, you'll find a side-by-side comparison of their ingredient labels. They at least publish the amount of acai berry they have in their juice. I find it funny that they also claim to have more acai in their juice than the MonaVie product - how is that possible when nobody knows how much acai is in the MonaVie product?

POWDER

The powders sure ran the gambit, but most of them are not all that pure in their ingredients. Even Dr. Perricone's powder (made from extract) had all kinds of other fruit extracts and ingredients. So you can get Dr. Perricone's Super Berry Powder with Acai for $50 for a month's supply, or for less than half the price, you can get Berry Splash. It looks like about the same ingredients - at least they provide some ORAC values (that's a way of measuring the antioxidants).

FREEZE DRIED CAPSULES

In this process, the berries are freeze dried and then processed as a powder or capsule. Most of the acai powders you see on the market are not actually freeze dried. They are usually made from a extract (which does not use the whole berry) or spray dried. There are some good ones, though. Check the ingredient labels.

I have found what I think is perhaps the purest grade of Acai available in an easy-to-take capsule form. Be sure to check out the link below for recommendations to various types of Acai Berry products.

To read which Acai Berry supplements are recommended (and which are not), go to: Acai Berry Article While you're there, get the free book Healthy Aging.

By GiGi Konwin

Cibus Global

Ag-tech upstart is armed to take on Monsanto
Posted by Jeffrey M. O'Brien
September 21, 2009 7:05 AM

Cibus Global uses bioscience to enhance plant genes with a different approach than agribusiness giants.


Israeli crop-protection company Makhteshim-Agan is investing $37 million in San Diego ag-tech startup Cibus Global to spur the development of new strains of crops that will be resistant to various forms of disease, pests, and herbicides.

The investment, which will occur over five years and will eventually allow the Israeli company to acquire slightly more than 50% of the startup, provides a shot in the arm for the 8-year-old upstart whose grand ambitions could put it on a collision course with ag-tech giants like Dow Chemical (DOW), Monsanto (MON), and Syngenta (SYT).

Cibus’s primary asset is its so-called Rapid Trait Development System. Unlike the transgenic approach used by Monsanto, where a foreign gene is inserted into a plant’s genome to confer, for example, immunity to an herbicide (à la Roundup-ready cotton and soybeans), Cibus’s technology teases out such characteristics from the genome without inserting foreign material.

It essentially hurries along standard plant breeding in a highly controlled setting. In simple terms, a molecule is inserted into a plant’s cell, causing the plant to mutate in a desired way. What could take Mother Nature tens of thousands of years to accomplish through millions of mutations over myriad generations takes Cibus anywhere from three to five years, lab to market.

Winning over activists and international governments

This is an important breakthrough for a few reasons: PR, accuracy, and money.

While the company is highly successful, Monsanto, for example, has battled a persistent public relations onslaught over its transgenic practices.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been largely resisted by European nations, rejected by much of Africa, and railed against by various environmental organizations that claim genetically modified crops are either highly infectious to other crops, potentially dangerous to our health, or both.

A technology that could achieve the same benefits — pest or herbicide resistance, for example — without inserting foreign material into a genome should gain the approval of the marketplace and activists alike.

What’s more, transgenic mutations are highly complex and notoriously difficult to get right — which makes for an expensive process.

Zigging while Monsanto zags

“Monsanto estimates that it takes as much as $50 million to launch a transgenic product, which includes all the regulatory work to get it cleared in the U.S. –- and in some parts of the world, it’s not even possible,” says Keith Walker, president of Cibus.

“For us," Walker says, "it’s a $5 million to $7 million exercise to take a product to market. That gives us opportunities to work in crops that are smaller in acreage.”

The arrangement with Makhteshim-Agan allows Walker and his team of bio-scientists to explore any number of crops and characteristics.

Walker won’t yet say which crops he’s targeting, but they won’t be the enormous ones where Monsanto already has a foothold: cotton, soy, and corn.

But that still leaves plenty of opportunity.

“The markets are multiple billions of dollars,” says Walker, “and you don’t have to go against Dow Chemical and Monsanto until you’re ready.”

Cibus has already gone through field testing with several crops and plans to release its first crop to market, an herbicide-resistant form of canola developed with BASF, in the U.S. by 2011 and other parts of the world a year later.

Its success in the marketplace should pave the way for Cibus to launch subsequent products quickly, and there are few ends to what such a technology can accomplish.

“Monsanto puts a whole gene in, but it’s not necessary,” says Walker. “Literally, as each day goes by, we see new information coming out of functional genomics research that creates new potential targets of opportunity.”

A new dawn!

Well, maybe not :-) Anyway, for the couple of folks following, I plan to start posting at least weekly at this location. The blog will contain community events, recipes, gardening tips and that sort of thing. Spread the word and keep checking in! If any of you all are familiar with RSS feeds, there is an option to subscribe on the blog. Enjoy!