It's scary how these açaí bowl places can advertise themselves as "healthy" when what they're selling has WAY more sugar than a bowl of ice cream or a 32 oz soda. :/

If "Acai" finds that point scary, others might be scarier. Popular perceptions of nutritional science have long been dominated by misunderstandings, advertising, and fads.

50 years ago, public-health guidance disdained all saturated fats in favor unsaturated fats of any kind, supporting the processed-fats industry's artifically hydrogenated vegetable oils, high in trans-bond fatty acids (scarce in nature). A leading advocate of those artificial fats, incidentally, was the "Center for Science in the Public Interest," a group dominated not by scientists but lawyers. It's now known that trans-bond fatty acids promote serious health problems, while some saturated fats are necessary nutrients.

Today it's fashionable to avoid wheat products, on the claims that (a) they promote obesity and (b) wheat was "genetically engineered" to increase gluten. Realities: French and Italians eat twice as much wheat as Americans, but have one-third the obesity rate; wheat gluten content has remained unchanged for centuries (and GMO wheat isn't commercially available here); many people harboring those misconceptions are alive to do so because gluten grains nourished generations of their ancestors.

This month a parallel blog post by Laura Stec advertises as "sugar free" a dessert recipe based on dates: Web Link Dried dates are over 60% sugars by weight; they and other ripe fruits deliver a typical natural sugar mix (especially fructose, glucose, and their compound, sucrose, aka table sugar, which reverts to fructose and glucose when digested), roughly like honey or high-fructose corn syrup; any biochemist will explain that these simple sugars have the same metabolic effects in human bodies regardless of source. Natural-fruit sources like dates do contain other nutrients unlike refined sugars; but calling a date-based recipe "sugar-free" is a real-life modern example of Orwellian euphemism.

These bowls taste much less sugary than the ones served at this location before. And the listed calorie count is a lot lower. Probably because of the reduced sugar? Anyways, my first impression of this place is good.