Acai Bowl? You Might as Well Just Eat Froot Loops

Acai breakfast bowls are available in every trendy smoothie and juice bar, but if you haven’t partaken in this particular superfood fad yet, you haven’t missed out. Turns out acai bowls don’t actually make a healthy start to the day after all.

Which is a healthier breakfast: a “superfood” acai bowl or THREE bowls of Froot Loops with skim milk? (Note that the recommended portion for Froot Loops is 1 cup or 29 grams.)

If it seems like a trick question, it’s not, at least inasmuch as the nutritional information for both is available for anyone to peruse if they so wish.

And in the case of Robeks Acai Strawnana Berry Bowl vs Kellogg’s, it’s easily arguable that you’d be a fruit loop to go for the former.

Tongue-in-cheek maybe, but the all-pervasive acai bowl is not so much of a joke when you consider people are being sold a lie, and a whole lot of sugar too.

If you've never eaten an “acai bowl”, may I hazard a guess that at least one of the following applies:

a) You don’t live in California or NYC

b) You’re not a millennial

c) You have the measure of the superfoods and know they’re nonsense

To bring you quickly up to speed, an acai bowl is typically made with frozen, sweetened, acai berry puree mixed variously with other whole, pureed, or juiced fruits, and sometimes with nut butters, yogurt or non-dairy milks. The whole lot is then topped with granola and banana slices, often with a generous dribble of honey or “healthy” agave syrup (a “natural” sugar that’s ironically much higher in fructose than high fructose corn syrup).

In short, that's a whole lot of carbs and sugars layered into a bowl and served up for breakfast. But hey, there’s that healthy acai right there in the name, so it’s going to be good for you, right?!

Err, nope.

What is acai any way?

Acai (pronounced “ah-sigh-ee”) are earthy, ever so vaguely chocolatey-tasting berries native to South and Central America. It’s the only place you'll ever get to eat them fresh as they are so perishable.

The fact that acai is such big business in the US is down to two entrepreneurial (and now very rich) brothers, Ryan and Jerry Black and their mate Ed Nichols, who saw a business opportunity to import acai while on a surfing trip to Brazil in 2000.

Even in processed puree and powder form, acai has still proved highly marketable as a “superfood”. That’s no real surprise: with a suitably exotic name and a bunch of antioxidants, it’s the perfect target about which the unscrupulous can make ridiculously extravagant claims. 

By all accounts (it’s hard to find a definitive source of information on its exact composition), acai is indeed a very nutritious little berry. But then so are strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries, and no one with a modicum of intelligence needs the likes of me to explain that the grandiose claims specially reserved for acai are all poppycock.

Instead, let’s assume that you don’t need it spelled out that an acai bowl won’t actually prevent cancer, boost your brain power, make you hornier, or give you radiant skin. That’s obvious.

Sugar bowls

However, you may still have been tempted by an acai bowl on the basis that it seems like an innocently fruity snack. It’s an honest mistake to make, but one you may not want to make again.

The table below lists how many calories and how much fiber and sugar there is in various popular acai bowls. A more calorie-laden sugar-fest of a breakfast you’d be hard pressed to find. (Spoiler alert: one popular acai bowl has 105 g of sugar, which is equivalent to 26 teaspoons, or more than the amount in two-and-a-half cans of Coca-Cola.)

By all means keep necking down an acai bowl brekkie if you’ve made an informed decision to do so in light of the facts. But at least agree that you might as well have three bowls of Froot Loops and some raspberries or blueberries on the side.

On the basis of a head-to-head nutrition analysis, the latter option is just as much a “superfood” start to the day.