You’ve walked past the problem for years. There’s no obvious solution so generally you just try to forget about it, you try to ignore it, but deep down it is still there, eating away at your subconscious.
Then one day it happens … the solution to your problem jumps into your head. It’s a beautiful solution, perfect, and you just can’t believe that you didn’t think of it before!
The ancient Greeks gave us the word Eureka to help us describe these revelations, but in our home we look at each other and we don’t say Eureka, we say ‘blackcurrants’.
Since we started to take New Zealand produced Blackcurrant Skin Extract capsules from Kiwi Superfoods, we have been encountering regular blackcurrant moments. We didn’t really understand why it was happening, but it was, and we were and are still loving it. More about the possible whys later.
Often, the revelations involve the simplest of things, done the same way for many years, for decades even. Suddenly a better way to do the task confronts you and you think, crikey, that’s a good idea, where did that come from? Give me some examples, I can almost hear you saying.
Something that has never fitted into its allocated spot will now fit perfectly, after you figure out all you needed to do was turn it around or upside down, or both. A simpler or cheaper way to achieve the same result will appear. Like deciding to hire or lease a bit of expensive kit rather than maintaining your own. Or, and I admit that this one’s a bit weird … you suddenly actually hear the words in a favourite song! You know the song, but you’d never actually thought much about the meaning of the words before, and bam, there they are in your head (depending on the music genre, this can sometimes be quite disturbing, so beware…)! Or you notice something and say, how long has that building, tree, sports center …whatever it is … been there. The answer is always ages … but you never noticed, until now.
Sometimes it is big. When you think that you have no way forward, but your blackcurrant augmented brain decides otherwise. For me personally, some of these blackcurrant moments have been life changing! Impossibly complex business tangles have, like a Gordian Knot, been sliced through with a blackcurrant moment.
Why does it happen? It could be because some New Zealand blackcurrant varieties contain an extremely difficult to obtain but known brain food called cGP. Kiwi Superfoods capsules certainly contain at least some cGP, but not knowing the exact levels, we lean more to it being because of what we do know it contains, and that is 100mg of anthocyanins (and 200mg of Vitamin C) per capsule. It takes the skins of about half a cup of fresh blackcurrants to get that much.
Within their skin, blackcurrants contain loads of these anthocyanin antioxidants. It’s what gives them their intense colour. They may look black, but it’s super concentrated purple … the same purple, the same anthocyanins (but at much lower levels), that you find in purple sweet potatoes, another well-known superfood. These tiny sized antioxidants are so small that they are easily absorbed and can actually cross the blood brain barrier. What does that do? The officially sanctioned medical benefit relating to NZ Blackcurrants is that they reduce oxidative stress, and this is often associated with muscle recovery times. Well, after taking the capsules for several years, we have no doubt that we do feel sharper and more positive, and we seriously hope that we continue to experience regular blackcurrant moments!
By Glenn Hughes