I just got a nice email from a reader of mine, Aart, and it is very useful information as many of you are bombarded with e-mails that ask you and tell you to join this or that Health oriented Company with their various "juices". So here we go:
Hello John,
I owe you an explanation about the warning I gave you about Vemma and I will explain it to you. If you mention healthy drinks, you can think about orangejuice, applejuice, grapejuice, goji berries juice, Vemma drink, Xango, etc. As soon as it concerns a fruit, that cannot be found locally, commerce jumps on it and promotion starts, shouting about the healthy properties of it.
As an example how promotion went completely wrong, you can take (Himalayan) Goji berries. To start with the name, originally the name for the goji berry is wolfsberry, but that does not sell so well, so they changed it into Goji, more or less how the Chinese pronounce this fruit. And to give it a glance of pureness they added Himalayan to it, although there won't grow any wolfsberry in the Himalaya, therefore it is too cold there.
The berries that are used for the Goji berries juice are coming from the province Ningxia, an area in China. The raw pressed juice is imported in the USA and go to the plant Aseptic Solutions for a so-called Flash Sterilization.
(Visit this link: http://goji.breathe.org/AsepticSolutionsUSA-archived-FAQ.pdf) The consequence of a flash sterilization is that it kills ALL micro-organisms. There is no reason to assume, that the Vemma drink production is different from the Goji berries juice production.
Maybe the VEMMA drink is put in a bottle in China under the same flash sterilization production method. And Vemma decided to add a second bottle to it, putting in there the vitamines, that are mentioning under the so-called ORAC value.
There is also a competitor of Vemma, bringing a similar kind of product to the market, called Xango. As the colour of Xango looks like grape juice, it is likely they added it to their product, because the Mangosteen is originally white, only the skin has a darkred colour. And in my opinion it is the best just to eat the Mangosteen on the market, what I do of course, living in Thailand. It is a delicious fruit, therefore it is also called the queen of fruit.
I have sent an e-mail to both Vemma and Xango with this question, but of course got no answer. To give a true answer would not be in their interest. Look also to this video, made in Canada about the Goji story: http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/01/goji.html
I hope to have served you herewith.
With kind regards, Aart
http://www.9planetreviews.com/blog.shtml
