In a move which, let's be honest, is not going to surprise anyone, a scientific paper published in the highly respected Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that there is no such thing as a "superfood," and that basically it's all just a bunch of marketing hype.
The superfoods trend began in the early 90s with a cookbook published by an alternative medical practitioner named Michael Van Straten. It was Van Straten's contention that some foods had amazing medicinal properties to cure diseases like cancer and prevent aging. However, as a researcher contacted by The Guardian points out, "if there really were phenomenal effects of these foods, we would know that by now."
The problem is two-fold: first, the human body is a vast and complicated mechanism, and you can't necessarily do tests on cells in a petri dish and expect that to scale. And second, marketing departments will seize on any perceived benefit in order to sell more units of their product, whether it's blueberries or dark chocolate.
In fact, the term "superfoods" has been so abused by food manufacturers that the term has been banned from food marketing in the EU since 2007. It's good to eat a variety of foods, and fresh fruit is a good addition to any diet, but it's simply not realistic to believe that eating lots of goji berries (or shark cartilage, or red wine, or whatever) will prevent cancer and keep you young forever. Our human mortality cannot be foiled by the right grocery shopping list.
Antioxidants are certainly good for you, but the latest research on vitamin supplements and superfoods generally concludes that in the West we suffer more from a surfeit of food than we do a lack of certain vitamins or nutrients. We're so overstuffed, it seems a bit silly to worry about what we should be eating more of.
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