SmarTasty
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A small, very sour stone fruit from Central and South America with lots of vitamin C. Mostly sold as frozen purée, juice or powder. Use it cold.
One of the most persistent food myths is that oranges or lemons are the undisputed ‘kings of vitamin C’. Botanically, nothing could be further from the truth. Walk through the humid tropics of South America under a blazing sun and you’ll find the tiny, bright red acerola cherry (Malpighia glabra). It isn’t related to European sweet cherries at all, and it tastes so sour and sharp that your cheeks suck in at the very first bite of the soft red flesh.
Up in the treetops, the acerola has one main job – coping with intense UV light:
Many biohackers have swapped cheap synthetic ascorbic acid capsules from the chemist (often made from corn starch) for raw organic acerola powder. Their argument: a lot of isolated synthetic vitamin C passes straight out in the urine, while in the fruit the vitamin comes packaged with other plant compounds – bioflavonoids (the plant’s pigments) and rutin. Whether this package really makes a measurable difference to how much vitamin C ends up in your blood hasn’t been clearly shown.
The adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys and produce cortisol and adrenaline. Few people know that they hold some of the highest vitamin C concentrations in the whole body. Long-term stress is often said to drain the body’s vitamin C. The popular idea that a 15-minute morning smoothie with acerola powder ‘refills’ the adrenals and puts an end to ‘adrenal fatigue’, though, goes well beyond the evidence.
Never cook expensive acerola juice into jelly on the hob or bake it into muffins. Vitamin C breaks down with heat, and cooking destroys much of it. **Only use it cold and uncooked** – for example as pink, gently freeze-dried fruit powder stirred into a cold berry açaí bowl on a Sunday morning.