Cautions and Adverse Effects

While caution is always needed when ingesting food, to date no rigorously conducted study has released safety advisories against the consumption of acai berries in North America. Nonetheless, while no information has been released on any interaction with pharmaceutical drugs either, this is attributable to the lack of investigative studies pairing acai berries with other products and testing its combined effects. Thus people who choose to indulge in Euterpe oleracea should pay attention to the development of any adverse effects that may arise and take appropriate action if needed.

While there have been no studies outside of South America that have implicated acai berries as causing any side effects, in Brazil, oral consumption of acai has been linked to Chagas’ disease, a parasitic illness. From January to November of 2006, in Brazil’s Pará state, 178 new cases of Chaga’s disease were reported (Nobrega et al., 2009). Brazil’s Ministry of Health conducted a study in 2006 which implicated the consumption of acai berries as the cause of the cases of Chagas’ disease. While this disease has been positively linked to Euterpe oleracea, it is due to the unhygienic nature of its harvest and not because of its actual components (Nobrega et al., 2009). Thus, the berries’ effects remain unknown.