Drink your blueberries

In a recent post I talked about consuming two and a half cups of blueberries to obtain an improvement in heart health indicators. Well today via Natural Health Reviews I found out that drinking a 500ml (two glasses) of Van Dyk 100% wild blue berry juice daily over a 12 week period has positive benefit in mental health and cognition of seniors. More precisely:

•  Improved paired associate learning and word list recall. 
• In addition, there were trends suggesting reduced depressive symptoms and lower glucose levels.

I wonder if drinking this 500ml of juice also had benefits for heart disease. It would be much easier to drink a bottle of juice (they come in 500ml glass bottles) than 2 1/2 cups of berries. Also it is likely to be cheaper in the blueberry off season. To obtain berries in the off season one would need to purchase them frozen, or pay exorbitant prices to get them air freighted from the other side of the world.

The drink is not yet available in NZ. However I am sure that google would reveal a distributor/retailer who would ship internationally. 

Reference: Robert Krikorian, Marcelle D. Shidler§, Tiffany A. Nash, Wilhelmina Kalt, Melinda R. Vinqvist-Tymchuk, Barbara Shukitt-Hale and James A. Joseph  Blueberry Supplementation Improves Memory in Older Adults J. Agric. Food Chem., 2010, 58 (7), pp 3996–4000  DOI: 10.1021/jf9029332