Dr. Alex Schauss

Alexander G. Schauss, PhD, FACN is the Senior Director of Natural and Medicinal Products Research, AIBMR Life Sciences, in Puyallup, Washington. A former Clinical Professor of Natural Products Research and Adjunct Research Professor of Botanical Medicine at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon, he has held academic appointments at other institutions, including: Senior Director of the Southwest College Research Institute in Scottsdale, Arizona; Associate Professor of Research at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, in Tempe, Arizona; Director of the Institute for Biosocial Research, City University, Seattle; and, Lecturer in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Bastyr University in Seattle.

Dr. Schauss has been a member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) Advisory Council (AMPAC); a member of the Ad Hoc Developmental Planning Committee of the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), a reviewer of botanical standards and information monographs for the U.S. Pharmacopoeia Convention (USP), and reviewer for the International Bibliographic Information on Dietary Supplements (IBIDS) database, maintained through an interagency partnership with the Food and Nutrition Information Center, National Agricultural Library, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which provides access to bibliographic citations and abstracts from published, international, scientific literature on dietary supplements. In 1985, Dr. Schauss was appointed by the US government to represent the United States as a voting member to the WHO Study Group on Health Promotion after being personally selected by Director General, Dr. Hafdan Mahler, of the World Health Organization (WHO), and confirmed by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Schauss has studied nutrition and botanical medicine for over 30 years. He is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition (FACN), an Emeritus Member of the New York Academy of Sciences, former Chairman of the Food Policy Council of the National Council for Public Health Policy, an Honorary Founding Member of the British Society of Nutritional Medicine, and Emeritus Executive Director of the American Preventive Medical Association. He is a member of the American Public Health Association, the American Chemical Society, the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals, the Society for Food Science and Technology, and an Associate Member of the Society of Toxicology.

What does he have to say about Acai?

In an excerpt from his medical research paper named “Açai (Euterpe oleracea): The Nutritional and Antioxidant-Rich Amazonian Palm Tree Fruit”, Dr. Schauss explains why new research has found the acai berry to be one of nature’s most wondrous fruits:

I research products that might explain why the incidence of certain diseases and conditions is lower in some parts of the world than in the United States. Nutrients in our diet can have an impact on social, psychological, and physiological behavior, so this is a logical place to look for explanations for differences in the incidence and prevalence of health disorder.

Hundreds of years ago when the Europeans made contact with the New World, certain groups of indigenous populations became extinct within a very short period of time because of the lack of resistance to diseases brought over from Europe. Some populations did survive, and for that reason, their tribes exist to this day. Quite a number of these groups are found in and around the tributaries and estuaries of the Amazon River. This is an area rich in a palm that bears a fruit called “acai.”

The acai fruit grows biannually in only three species of palm trees. This fruit is remarkably rich in a very large range of macronutrients, micronutrients, and trace elements. It has a broad range of essential amino acids, carbohydrates, fatty acids, and vitamins and minerals. So rich in nutrients is the acai fruit that it is possible someone could survive on it alone for quite a period of time without showing signs of malnutrition.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to go to Portugal and visit the anthropology department of a prominent university. I wanted to find certain watercolors that were drawn by naturalists and botanists who went to the Amazon in the 18th century. The drawings were in impeccable condition and showed natives holding small, berry-sized fruit in their hands and baskets against a backdrop of local fauna, including the acai palm tree. This provided hard evidence of its traditional use as a food source by natives over 200 years ago.

Some years ago I was the first scientist to determine the antioxidant activity of acai fruit using the oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) assay. This assay and others allowed me to discover that acai had unusually high antioxidant and scavenging activity in vitro against hydroxyl, peroxyl, peroxynitrite, and superoxide anion free radicals, compared to all of the common fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States.

The results were so striking in comparison to other food sources of antioxidants that we ultimately determined how to preserve this antioxidant activity so that the fruit could be exported in a form that would retain its benefits.

The Açai fruit has a very broad nutritional value to humans. It has remarkably high antioxidant activity. Based on new data about the antioxidant levels of American foods that was published in early 2005 by US government, data shows that Açai has significantly greater antioxidant activity on a gram to gram comparative basis than any of the common fruits or vegetables Americans consume.

When asked about the acai in products on the market today, Dr. Schauss had this to say:

What mystifies me is that the açai products we tested in the commercial marketplace had a fraction of the antioxidant activity reported in our paper for OptiAcai.

You will note that in our paper we report that the highest Total ORAC we found was 155 for any freeze dried sample, compared to the 1026.9 for OptiAcai. USDA and Brunswick Laboratories confirmed the unusually high ORAC.

Personally, I am intrigued not only by its extraordinarily high peroxyl scavenging activity, the highest of any food by far reported, but by its unusually high superoxide scavenging activity in vitro because as we go from molecular oxygen to superoxide to hydrogen peroxide we can create the most damaging of all ROS’s (reactive oxygen species), the hydroxyl radical.”

If OptiAcai can be shown in vivo to significantly inhibit excessive hydroxyl radical formation, the implications for the prevention of diseases involving ROS, in addition to its benefit in slowing the rate of age related markers, could be profound.

We believe there are many reasons for the lower ORAC values of various açai’s that have been the market for some time. First, freeze-drying is superior to spray drying or air drying in retaining phytochemicals and nutrients, but more expensive.

We believe that other suppliers have not considered the issue of enzymatic degradation of the fruit. We systematically studied this issue years ago to determine when to process the fruit into a powder. This was all done in Brazil.

Much of what is being shipped out of Brazil comes to the USA or Europe in container sized frozen blocks. This does not prevent the continuous degradation of the polyphenolics. Hence, this would explain why we obtained such low Total ORAC units for frozen acai samples.