Superfoods are not so super

You have almost certainly been subjected to some level of advertising under the banner of this month's superfood. It used to be kale, now it is acai (whatever that is), it was previously cranberries which actually taste awful unless they are mixed with a ton of sugar, and pomegranates do loads of things for you in the form of antioxidants which is something that people just presume must be good for you since oxidants are bad for you? Wait, are they? Why do we need to be against oxidants? What are oxidants?

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Let's keep things simple ok? We all know that we need to eat more fruit and really really need to eat more vegetables yet most of us don't manage to pull that much off. Now we are getting pressured to get involved with very specific fruits and veg and berries like acai that for all we know are something that was just introduced to earth a few years ago because nobody ever talked about them before then.

I think acai berries piss me off the most because there are extraordinary claims made about it such as the fact that it is a fat-burning fruit despite the fact that there is no such thing and there is exactly zero clinical research that has been done that shows this is the case.

What happens is that some industry like the conglomerate of people that grow acai berries will spend some amount of their joint advertising budget convincing the public that these crazy claims are based in reality. They find some influential celebrities like Dr. Oz to back up their claims in exchange for a bunch of money and voila! Now it is a superfood despite the fact that it is chemically almost identical to other berries.

So why did this happen? It is because previously these berries, which are simply a side product of palm trees in South America, didn't have a marketable purpose and often went completely unused. Since they are not poisonous, the quacks got working on trying to find some reason to eat it... enter anti-oxidants.

While i am sure there is some benefit to anti-oxidants, all experts agree that loading up on them in excessive quantities isn't actually beneficial to your body. It's similar to this time where there was a stupid product named *Emegence-C" that came as a powder and you would stir it in water when you started to feel ill. The package claimed that it contained 3,500% the daily dose of Vitamin C. Here's the thing folks, your body can not use much more than 100% and this would be similar to you filling your car up with 35 times the amount of gasoline that actually fits into the tank. It's just gonna spill on the ground.

This isn't to suggest that you should only get 100% and be very careful to go over that amount. But if you are eating a normal amount of fruit and veg anyway, or simply taking a multivitamin, then there is exactly zero reason to buy a fruit that is 4-6 times as expensive per ounce as other fruit is.

Do you like being manipulated by marketing to take money from you on things that you do not need and in many cases dont even have more of whatever super thing they are referring to in it? Because if you go and buy this stuff you are simply emptying your wallet faster on a passing fad. You are getting duped by celebrities and corporations into paying a premium for a product that has no real benefit other than making money for the producers.

Just eat vegetables... or take a multivitamin (more on those later)... stop throwing money away.