Mark Knopfler

My first experience of Salvia was something foisted onto me by the pretty relentless coverage we face every day in the newspapers, on TV and on the radio. I wouldn’t have heard of Salvia were it not for the continued calls for it to be banned in State X and State Y. Anyway, this constant discouragement made me want to try it all the more.

So I got some, and I started smoking it through a special Salvia pipe that I made using some instructions I found on the Web.

Initially I didn’t notice whether anything had happened; then I realized that everything was eerily quiet and still. The clock ticked so much slower than it should do and I had a very odd sense of time having slowed down considerably.

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone” goes the W H Auden poem. The clocks had pretty much stopped but unfortunately I didn’t have a juicy bone for the dog. The big, ethereal dog that stood before me, barking. Help!

Everything eventually went away and I emerged from my first experience of Salvia shaken but unharmed. Will I try it again? Of course I will!

You may not know this, but what is commonly known as an acai berry, really isn’t a berry, but as a matter of fact, it’s a round drupe that is only around 1 inch wide and looks like a grape. This fruit is found in abundances of 700 to 900 individual drupes. A tree, on average, produces two crops every year. Inside this “berry” is a huge pit, or seed, that takes up to 80% of the entire mass of the acai fruit. Acai has surged in popularity because people have shown that Acai Berry
helps weight loss.

The Caboclo people, of the Brazilian rainforest, are the ones that harvest the acai berry, and use this fruit as 42% of their nutrition.
Once the acai berry is harvested, it begins to degrade at a very fast rate, which makes it challenging to export to a surrounding area. For this reason, acai berries are made into several different products like preserves, juice, supplements and pulp. Acai supplements claim to be an incredible aid when trying to diet and acai promotes weight loss in the right diet. Even without the weight loss benefit of acai it is a valuable addition to your diet.

It has been claimed that a acai supplement can retain the majority of the properties and nutrients that start off in its raw form, and because of this, a supplement of an acai berry is a convenient and effects way of getting all of its goodness into your daily routine and helping acai help with weight loss.

Sales of Pure Acai has undoubtedly been helped by the recent surge in interest in acai. This is interest is timely, because it was becoming clear that products like Pure Acai that have been on the market for a while have done a fantastic job but have not, until now, got the sales and recognition that they deserved. Now, with Oprah Winfrey on the case, Pure Acai has the best chance it has ever had to grab the market share it richly deserves.

The thing that brought acai to the attention of Ms. Winfrey was an excellent book published by Dr. Perricone of the University of Michigan State. In his book Perricone announced that the acai berry was his number 1 super food Quite an accolade. Winfrey picked up on this praise and featured the book — and the berry — on her show. And if you want something shown to the world it is a good idea to let Winfrey know. Dr. Perricone, his book and even the erstwhile humble acai berry have enjoyed attention never before imagined.

So it was that people started to realize the potential of products like Pure Acai as help for their diets. This approach has been endorsed by prominent figures across the world.

People like to get and stay healthy. People absolutely love to diet as part of this health process. It is no surprise that something like acai — the greatest super food known to man — has gained such a big following. Acai is packed full of the essential nutrients that your body needs to function properly; one portion of acai can replace many times that amount of other ‘normal’ food in your diet. The effects on you dieting regime are obvious.

Those of us that have been quick enough to buy acai are invariable pleased with its effects. There are others that haven’t yet had the opportunity to buy acai. Some of this latter group of people will just not known where to start. Where to buy acai from is one of the first concerns. Online, is the quick and truthful answer.

Anyone wanting to buy acai will find that it doesn’t come in its natural berry form; unfortunately it can’t because it can’t travel like this. What you will find if you try to buy acai is that there are lots of delicious and nutritious products made from acai or from acai extracts. What works for you is down to what you want to do with the acai once you have it.

Legal highs have been around for years and have never been of much concern to parents, but one brand with a funky name has caused a huge amount of controversy in America and left many questioning just how “herbal” these substances are.

Herbal highs can be bought in some stores and through countless websites. Because they tread the line between hard drugs and legal highs, there’s no law in place to stop kids from buying the substances. Herbal ecstasy is one type of legal high that kids occasionally try.

Another legal high, although this time more generally tried by adults, is salvia divinorum, a substance that people smoke and then experience intense trips involving hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. Salvia is loved and hated in equal measure.

Most kids aren’t particularly keen on experimenting with salvia, so they turn to other substances. However, while the use of hard drugs has been steadily declining among kids in US schools, the abuse of over-the-counter products, salvia included, has been on the rise.

This all came to ahead recently when four school children in Pennsylvania were rushed to hospital after taking Snurf pills. Parents immediately took notice and called in a group of experts to analyze exactly what is in the pills.

The experts are still unsure what Snurf pills are, but some suspect, after looking at the effects the pills produce, that Snurf pills contain dextromethorphan (DMX), a substance that an estimated one in ten children from grades seven to twelve has tried at one point or another.

Parents have been on the rampage ever since, trying to get websites selling these Snurf pills close down, but as the pills are technically legal and can be bought from one of countless websites, it has been an uphill struggle.

Other legal highs include Spirit Walk, a substance that comes in pill form and give users an experience similar to taking magic mushrooms.

It seems to be the common attitude that if something is a ‘drug’, if it causes hallucinations or highs of some kind, and if it brings pleasure to some people without being of detriment to others, then it must be A Bad Thing. This is a strange attitude, when you think about it logically, and one which doesn’t really make sense.

So it is that the public attitude towards Salvia is tainted. The public’s attitude towards those of us that buy Salvia is similarly tainted, and I sometimes feel alienated because I enjoy the spiritual feeling it gives me. Certainly I feel that I cannot buy Salvia openly in public, and I never admit to colleagues that I buy Salvia online.

The fact that I buy Salvia does not make me a monster. I am a good Christian, and I am a doctor. Why should the fact that I enjoy hallucinating and exploring my spiritual side mean that I should be outcast? There is a good reason that Salvia has remained legal for so long, and that is that it is not dangerous or harmful. Why is this never taken into consideration by those who want to see it banned?

Unless you are a resident of the Amazon basin in Brazil, getting actual acai berries will prove very difficult indeed. With the acai becoming an increasingly popular way to keep fit — acai diets booming in popularity lately — distributors are finding more and more impressive ways to get the acai to your door in as close to a natural state as possible. Here’s the good news: it has worked.

Acai preserves are generally acknowledged to be one of the purest ways to enable the acai to travel the world. When you consider that acai preserves contain around 99% pure acai fruit and have undergone minimal processing, you start to realize just what a good deal this is: you’re essentially getting a jar full of delicious acai berries.

And if there’s one thing that acai preserves are good at, it is being delicious. The acai preserves I have tasted taste like some kind of ingenious combination of fruit and chocolate syrup. I actually had a hard time acknowledging that something so delicious could be good for me. Put it this way: I’m glad it is good for me otherwise I would be in big trouble! Acai preserves might not make up 42% of my food by weight like it does for some in the depths of Brazil, but it would if I could find enough jars!

Dr. Perricone must have been thanking his lucky stars when no other than Oprah Winfrey featured his book — The Perricone Promise — on her TV show. Not only would the millions of people watching the show be tempted to go out and buy it, but it would quickly bring it to the attention of media outlets and broadcasters across the world. This was payday for Dr. Perricone.

It was also payday for the many produces or acai products: manufacturers and distributors of acai berry supplements, preserves, purees and juices must have jumped for joy at the news of the success of Dr. Perricone’s book. Acai, and by association acai supplements and the rest of the products, was named by Dr. Perricone as the world’s number one super food. Quite an accolade, I am sure you agree, and definitely one that helped to catapult sales of acai berry supplements to a level we have never seen before.

The problem with acai — if it is really a problem — is that the fruit degrades worryingly quickly once it has been harvested. This means that it is very difficult to store and transport. Processing the berry into acai supplements is a benefit that first solves this particular ‘problem’.

Scientists are quite literally crazy. Some of them, but not all, you understand. They’ve all got a very special mindset which chases problems just for the intellectual thrill. Many of history’s greatest discoveries though have come from what have apparently been purely intellectual pursuits from the start.

Salvia is a perfect example of what would appear to be an intellectual challenge without any real world applications. Scientists have known about Salvia for decades — perhaps longer — but they have never really studied it or its effect on the brain until very recently.

This research started in earnest a few years ago once talk of banning Salvia came to light — nothing like a catastrophe to focus the mind, is there? — and researchers are now wishing they had started much earlier.

There have been a few very, very exciting discoveries linked with Salvia. One is that research into the way the brain works under the influence of Salvia might just help us to understand how it works under the influence of Alzheimer’s. In this wonderfully interesting case there is no potential for Salvia to be the direct saviour, but it could assist the real saviours — the doctors — in finding a real cure to what is a real problem.

Nutritionists, doctors and scientists all agree that the acai berry can be good for your body. It adds amino acids and anti-oxidants into your system that build up your strength and even help your immune system. The berry comes from the depths of the Amazon basin in Brazil and it is impossible — due to the quick degradation that the acai suffers — to transport it in its natural form.

One of the most popular ways around this limitation is acai juice. This is essentially just crushed acai in a bottle.

Essentially, but not quite. Especially in the case of one of the products with, until recently, a sizeable market share. The Monavie acai juice enjoyed moderate success but has now been found to be lacking in some key area. One of the key areas that Monavie has been accused of falling short on is the fact that there is very little acai in their so called acai juice.

Two of the Monavie products contain ‘100% fruit juice from concentrate’, along with some powdered acai. The Monavie Pulse product contains reconstituted fruit juice blend along with — you guessed it — powdered acai.

There is no reason to pay more for Monavie acai when it is so lacking in such an essential ingredient.