GuaranáPaullinia cupana

Did you know?

• Guaraná seeds contain about 2 to 7 percent caffeine, several times as much as coffee beans^{[3, 5, 6]}.

• When the fruit ripens, its red skin splits open to show a black seed set in white, and the fruit looks strikingly like an eye^{[3, 4]}.

• The Sateré-Mawé call the plant waraná, the word behind the name guaraná, and say it means "the beginning of all knowledge"^[4].

• The Sateré-Mawé press roasted guaraná into hard sticks and grate them, traditionally on the bony tongue of the pirarucu, one of the Amazon's largest fish, or on a rough stone, to make a drink called çapó^{[3, 4]}.

• Brazilians have been drinking guaraná soda for more than a century^[3].

• Guaraná is sometimes called Brazilian cocoa^{[7, 8]}.

Origins and history

Guaraná is a scrambling shrub or woody vine of the wet tropical forests of the Amazon basin^{[1, 5, 6]}. Its fruits are red, and when they ripen the skin splits to reveal a black seed set in white flesh, so that each fruit looks like an eye^[3]. Its large leaves are divided into five leaflets, and each grape-sized fruit usually holds a single seed shaped like a tiny horse chestnut^[5]. The botanist Carl Sigismund Kunth gave the plant its scientific name in 1821, in the great work describing the plants gathered on Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland's travels in South America^{[1, 2]}. His species name, cupana, is still one of the plant's common names^{[1, 2]}.

For the Sateré-Mawé people, whose homeland lies in the central Brazilian Amazon, guaraná is at the heart of their culture^{[3, 4]}. Their origin story tells of a much-loved child who was killed. From the child's buried eye grew the first guaraná plant, and that is why its fruit still looks like an eye^{[3, 4]}. The Sateré-Mawé count themselves that child's descendants^[4]. Guaraná was domesticated in the forests between the lower Tapajós and lower Madeira rivers, and in the late 1600s the Jesuit missionary João Felipe Betendorf wrote that the Sateré-Mawé valued it as highly as Europeans valued gold^[3]. They have tended guaraná for centuries and still do, gathering the seedlings that sprout from fallen seeds and replanting them^{[3, 4]}.

The traditional preparation is careful work. The seeds are roasted in clay ovens, pounded in a mortar with a little water, and shaped into sticks, which are dried and then smoked over aromatic wood for several weeks until hard^{[3, 4]}. The sticks weigh anything from about 150 grams to more than 2 kilograms^[4]. To make the drink the Sateré-Mawé call çapó, a stick is grated into water^{[3, 4]}. Today most guaraná is grown on farms in Brazil, where its roasted seed also flavors the country's guaraná sodas^{[3, 6]}.

Traditional uses

Guaraná's lift comes mainly from its natural caffeine^{[7, 8]}, and people across South America have long valued its roasted seed as a stimulating drink^{[5, 6]}.

• Energy and alertness

  Guaraná supports energy and mental alertness, and helps with occasional tiredness.*^{[7, 8]}

• A roasted-seed drink

  The seeds are roasted, pounded into a paste and mixed with water to make a bitter, stimulating drink^{[3, 5, 6]}.

• A flavor for soft drinks

  In Brazil, guaraná seed has flavored popular sodas for more than a century^{[3, 6]}.

Plant compounds

Guaraná seed contains caffeine, about 2 to 7 percent of the seed by weight, with smaller amounts of the related compounds theobromine and theophylline^{[3, 6, 8]}. It is also rich in tannins, which give the drink its bitter, astringent taste, and contains saponins, starch, gum and volatile oils^[5].