By Kimberly J. Decker, Contributing Editor
It’s universally acknowledged among food and beverage marketers that “healthy" is a tough sell—except, that is, when you’re talking about fruit. Witness the breathless gushing over superfruits to see how health benefits, or even a rumor thereof, can turn a little-known berry into a celebrity.
But solid evidence supports the nutritional value of all fruits, not just the superstars. Even so, product developers can’t help keeping an eye out for the next “it" fruit to feature in their products.
Superfruits to the rescue
The superfruit hardly needs introduction. But to be clear, “a superfruit is a fruit having exceptional nutrient richness, antioxidant quality and novel taste," says Kasi Sundaresan, Ph.D., manager, research, development and quality, iTi tropicals, Inc., Lawrenceville, NJ. “For example, a fruit like acerola or camu camu is a superfruit because of exceptionally high vitamin C values."
Other exotic superfruits include the maqui berry, a dark-purple Patagonian export that promoters claim has higher antioxidant values than any other fruit, and guarana, a native of Brazil’s and Venezuela’s rainforests with about twice as much caffeine, seed per bean, as coffee. The Indian gooseberry, or amla, has high levels of tannins and a long history of use in ayurvedic treatments. Uchuva, or Cape gooseberry, is a sweet-tart fruit from Colombia—and cultivated in South Africa—rich in dietary fiber. Gac, a spiny Southeast Asian specimen rife with carotenes has long been used in Eastern medicine for eye health, but has the unfortunate drawbacks of toxic skin and flesh, and seeds—the only edible part—that resemble intestines.
Health or hype?
“With more superfruits entering the market from different parts of the world," Sundaresan says, “there are no clear favorites among them. Some fruits, like açaí, are very popular due to their nutrient density—they’re rich in omega-3s, fiber and protein—and some others, like guava, camu camu and acerola, are rich in vitamin C. Pomegranate, mangosteen and goji are all known for their high antioxidant potential."
But is the ballyhoo over superfruits a healthy addition to the discussion, or a lot of hype? “The current superfruit marketing can be misleading," Sundaresan allows. “There are no guidelines for superfruit inclusion or labeling in foods and beverages, and this is having a negative effect on perceptions, as more consumers face claims that products containing superfruits can make them healthy or cure disease."
Thomas J. Payne, market development, U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council, Folsom, CA, agrees: “The term ‘superfruit,’ like the term ‘Super Bowl,’ has proved an effective marketing tool. It has directed consumers’ attention to ingredients that they might never have noticed otherwise." But many of the most-talked-about superfruits “are not well-known or well-studied in the western world," he says.
Payne also raises the issue of food safety, as “consumers have been given reason for concern about the origins of their foods, especially with the exotic and unfamiliar."
Then there’s that all-important matter of taste. “Retailers and foodservice purveyors are buying for flavor and not necessarily for their nutritional profile," says Robert Schueller, director, public relations, Melissa’s World Variety Produce, Los Angeles. Some healthy fruits, he admits, aren’t such a treat. For example, açaí has a notoriously oily taste; dragon fruit has been described as “like crunchy water"; and the durian supposedly tastes heavenly—if you can get past an aroma not unlike dirty gym socks left to fester in a sewer.
By the numbers
The marketing hype has made a growing chorus of skeptics question the nutrition stories of some fruits. Firstly, there’s no guarantee that enough of the contributing fruit makes it into a product to deliver the purported benefits. But even beyond matters of formulation, the very validity, or at least the utility, of all those reported antioxidant levels deserves scrutiny.
Antioxidants get much of the credit for fruits’ current nutritional cachet as they are “thought to help protect the body against the damaging effects of free radicals and the diseases associated with the aging process," says Payne. ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) is a well-known analytical method that measures a food’s antioxidant levels; the higher the ORAC value—usually stated in micromoles of Trolox equivalents (TE) per 100 grams of sample—the better the ability to neutralize free radicals. (Other measures of antioxidant capacity include TEAC, or Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity, and FRAP, or ferric reducing ability of plasma.)
But ORAC and its like open only one window—and a foggy one at that—into a substance’s real-world radical-quenching potential. Most fruits possess a whole set of antioxidants; ORAC doesn’t tell us which are most effective. Furthermore, it measures antioxidant capacity mainly against the peroxyl radical, whereas many different oxidative species assault us in nature. And, while ORAC supplies an antioxidant snapshot under experimental conditions, it doesn’t predict how those antioxidants will behave in the complex soup of the human digestive system or, if they survive the journey, in individual cells.
Finally, most of what we know about ORAC values comes from a smattering of studies that, taken in isolation, hardly comprise the definitive word on the subject. Consider that many of those studies are commissioned by parties with a vested interest in the outcome and the cause for skepticism rises.
Apples to oranges
For the average consumer craving a healthful snack, fussing over oxygen-radical quenching capacities and Trolox equivalents is overkill. Experts agree that the simplest, most-effective nutrition strategy is to keep an eye on color. “When you think of red, you think of the antioxidant lycopene," Scheuller says. “When you think of blacks and blues and purples, you think of anthocyanins, which have been touted in superfruits known to have high levels of antioxidants."
