Why fifty fun facts about berries? Well, actually I could give you more than a hundred but what amusing alliteration could be strung together with an "h"? ;>)

This series will be sent out to you as a group of 5 facts each time, once a week over the next 10 weeks, or maybe longer if your feedback says you like it!

The facts are miscellaneous in order, so there is no order of scientific importance.

Before we begin, in the message earlier this week on goji (wolfberry), this statement appeared in the essay mailout:

Goji is an English contraction of the Chinese Mandarin name, gouqi;

(pronounced "goo-chee" for wolfberry)

The Mandarin name roughly translates to "wolfberry plant" and would be pronounced "goo-chee". I use this as an explanation for how the increasingly common name "goji" may have evolved in reference to wolfberry.

Further discussion of this etymology is given at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfberry

Bottom line: goji and wolfberry are the same plant, Lycium barbarum L., or some hybrid cultivar ("cultivated variety") of it just like there are cultivars by the dozens for grapes (Vitis vinifera), blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) and other berries.

Over centuries, the popular wolfberry plant was likely transported and cultivated across many parts of China and other regions of Asia.

Issue #1 – First Five of Fifty Fun Facts!

1.The black raspberry, Rubus occidentalis, has pigmentation so strong that the USDA used its juice as a stamp on meat products for more than 40 years!

2.Black raspberry has a higher antioxidant rating (ORAC of about 15,000 units per 100 g) than the more commonly accepted antioxidant “king”, blueberry (9,000 ORAC units)

3.The most popular blackberry in the world, the “Marionberry” (Rubus ursinus), is named after the county in Oregon (Marion County) where it was developed in the mid 1950s. Oregon still produces the largest quantities of Marionberries for world markets -

more than 30 million pounds per year!

See more information at http://marionberries.com

4.A phenolic antioxidant made by plants (as an anti-microbial defense chemical) and found in diverse dark, antioxidant-intense berries such as acai, black raspberry and blackberry is a flavonoid called cyanidin-3-glycoside (C3G). Remember this name, as C3G is becoming established scientifically with potency against several types of cancer in laboratory studies, and there will be more public information soon.

A patent has been submitted as the first step to commercialize C3G – an interesting fact itself: can derivatives from natural plants be patented?

5.New studies published in the J. Agric. Food Chem., vol. 54, 2006 on acai antioxidants rank it at the top of the ORAC charts among fruits – 102,700 total ORAC units per 100 g. These are the highest values yet established for ORAC in a fruit. Cranberries and wild blueberries score around 9,000 units of total ORAC.

[Note: acai ("ah-sigh-ee", Portuguese) is the tropical palmberry,

one of the most exciting exotic antioxidant fruits for

the evolving functional foods industry.

We'll have lots of information about it here in

future discussions from The Berry Doctor's Journal!]

Have a great Holiday weekend! See you at the next round of Fifty Fun Facts!

Dr. Paul
The Berry Doctor