6 ms·

How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

34 points by found_reading 9y ago

maxxxxx 9y ago
Whenever someone talks about "superfoods" I immediately think they are full of shit. It's just an attempt to make something simple (normal food) into something expensive to make money from. Same happened to exercise. The basics of exercise haven't changed in a long time but you still have people repackaging it to make money.
- eatbitseveryday 9y ago
  Most of these happenings, in my opinion, just take advantage of consumer ignorance. Getting your advice about anything in life from product advertising is what advertisers want.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  It's an extra bummer because they price things higher when there's a market of customers saying "If I keep chugging this pomegranate juice I'll never get cancer, it's got antioxidants!" Some of us just wanted to drink that because it tastes good...
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    "antioxidants" is also on my bullshit list
    - sushid 9y ago
      What? Sure, don't buy the marketing hype but antioxidants ingested via food (as oppposed to pills) is supposed to be beneficial to you. When you say it's "on your bullshit list" do you mean you don't believe in things like free radicals? Or do you mean that you don't think there's antioxidants in abundant supply in said product?
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        I believe that food can't be reduced to one ingredient. If something contains antioxidants but also a ton of sugar or other stuff you have take that into account too and see if the net effect is positive or negative. You can't just say food with antioxidants is good for you. It's like eating organic chocolate. It's maybe a little better than regular but it's still chocolate with a ton of sugar so net it's not good for you.
      - Symmetry 9y ago
        There are sound theoretical reasons to think that antioxidant ingestion ought to be good for you and the antioxidants in your body are certainly important. But all the research I've seen on the matter is that ingesting extra antioxidants has the opposite of the effect you'd expect. I'd guess this is some homeostasis related interaction but I don't think anybody actually knows why.
      - wlesieutre 9y ago
        Even if antioxidants are good for you, I can't see a cup of juice being the optimal way to get them. 160 calories / 8 oz serving. As far as antioxidants themselves are concerned, if you do go the pills route, be sure it's not too much. High levels are linked to increased cancer risk, which is the opposite of what people are going for. How much is too much? I dunno, but I figure the amount I get from drinking tea isn't going to kill me.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    Actually there are studies demonstrating that pomegranate improves blood circulation - and for me that's the main reason to use it. Antioxidants etc. is just bullshit. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146683/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146683/
- whathaschanged 9y ago
  Coconut water is repackaged waste byproduct that someone figured out how to make money off of. It's classic marketing.
  - padthai 9y ago
    Coconut water was always very popular as soft drink in producing countries. Not waste.
    - blowski 9y ago
      In Brazil, it’s a traditional remedy if you have a bad stomach. It’s also sold at a lot of tourist destinations fresh from the coconut as it’s very refreshing.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Common, but in somewhat limited quantities. "Anecdotal sources describe coconut water is used in India for the senicide of elderly people, a procedure known as thalaikoothal.[13] In this custom, the elderly person is made to drink an excessive amount of coconut water, eventually resulting in fever and death, the exact causes of which have not been determined.[13]"
      - pera 9y ago
        In Brazil is extremely common, at least in the south: during the summer you can buy cold green coconuts pretty much everywhere, but specially in the coast; I used to drink it almost daily.
      - mturmon 9y ago
        I'm not sure what your point is here. It's well-known that green coconut vendors are very common in India (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tender_coconut_vendor_in_India.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tender_coconut_vendo...). They have a cart of coconuts, chop the top off of one as you watch, and hand it to you to drink. As a tourist, it seemed to me to be safer than drinking water. So, to the original point above, coconut water is not waste, and is quite refreshing, and fills a useful niche if you're worried about stomach bugs.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Superfoods is a marketing term. I love saying you know what is a superfood? Beans and mushrooms and they say no thank you and walk away with their seaweed and chia smoothie. "'The term "superfoods" is at best meaningless and at worst harmful,' said Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London. 'There are so many wrong ideas about superfoods that I don't know where best to begin to dismantle the whole concept.'" https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/13/health.healthandwellbeing1 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/13/health.healthandw... PS My WIFE says superfood at least 3 times a week and I have a ton of Chia and Quinoa in my kitchen I like the taste of them and my wife feels healthy. I bought them on Amazon in bulk and were super cheap. Now if I could only get her to stop juicing!!!!!!! UGH that is the worst! Ginger and Prickly Pear with God knows what else!
- misterHN 9y ago
  In California, the problem is quite serous. There is a food cartel that runs on undocumented labor. The California food industry maintains artificially high prices because the people in it are racists. These sick people will do anything to manipulate their victims, including using words like "superfood" to trick them into a false sense of security.
jerf 9y ago
"Sales of coconut water have skyrocketed in the past two years, and anecdotally, several fitness buffs interviewed by Marketplace said they believe it hydrates better than tap water." That's... that's a tall bar. "Provides more electrolytes" than water, sure. "More energizing than water", sure. But hydrates better than water? Though a charitable reading of the fitness buff's claim could be that it's "better for someone working out than water", which, again, is at least possible as there are more dimensions than just "hydration" there.
- Darmani 9y ago
  Both energy drinks and milk absorb better than water. Doesn't seem odd that coconut water is in the and category.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Doesn't matter. Even if I only absorbed 90% of the water I drank, I could just drink 1.111 L of water to get 1 L of "hydration", and it would still be cheaper than drinking 1 L of Brawndo, the Thirst Annihilator. On a money cost basis, in any place on Earth that has municipal drinking water on tap, drinking that water is the cheapest way to hydrate your body. Whether or not "best" includes the money cost is a matter of opinion, but most people at least include it as a factor. The same goes for a lot of "superfoods". On a cost basis, whatever you get from 100g of the "superfood" can probably be obtained by eating 200g of something else, sold at a much lower price. Or it's only of interest to vegans, because the "something else" is an animal product. People on western diets just aren't limited by nutrition content. If you eat your normal calorie quota--even a reduced quota from a weight-loss diet--you can always get adequate nutrition from just the normal, healthy, non-"super" foods. There's nothing stopping you from eating a bucketful of broccoli with a bit of salmon, and skipping the wheatgrass-kale-chia-pomegranate super-smoothies forever.
    - nrenegar 9y ago
      But Brawndo's got electrolytes.
  - 9y ago
will_brown 9y ago
They seem to be making strangely isolated measurements that have little to do with the claimed benefits of the alleged superfoods. For starters I think most people agree there is no need to replace electrolytes during endurance activities that do not exceed 1 hour, oddly the length of time in this study. I’m not sure anyone claims coconut water hydrates better than water, but certainly it’s going to be more beneficial for replacing lost electrolytes. Personally, I’d like to see a study regarding coconut milk vs water and the hydration effects on the intestines themselves, my hypothesis would be intestines hydrated with coconut milk more readily absorb vitamins and nutrients from other foods than intestines hydrated with just water, either way it would be an interesting experiment. As to chia seeds being compared to salmon, that alone should probably confirm their status as a food rich in omega 3 fatty acids, as salmon is one of the best sources of omega 3 fatty acids. But what’s the use case? As a runner I am more inclined to drink water or coconut milk with a teaspoon of soaked chia seeds rather than run with a belly full of salmon, but for dinner I’d rather have a plate of salmon than a teaspoon of chia seed. And omega 3s are not the sole benefit of chia seeds, As natures form of time release capsules they will provide some degree of continued hydration during long runs from the liquid they were soaked in that salmon will not. It seems they could have measured the hydrating effects of the chia seed vs the salmon, but instead they only seem to focus on the percent of omega 3 obsorption of chia vs salmon, but as I said these were oddly isolated measurements.
- gxs 9y ago
  Once you start getting into this type of thinking it's really easy to go down a rabbit hole. I'd love to see the same research, but if you start digging into this subject you will be disappointed in the answers you get. After researching this stuff as a hobby for some time, I've come to the conclusion that this stuff is not well understood and there is still a lot left to explore. As technical people, we sometimes look for something along the lines of hey - this is the chemical composition of something, balance some equations and figure out the affect it has on our body chemistry. This is just an exmaple, of course it's simplified and not quite accurate. Unfortunately it's not that simple and doing this kind of research requires a ton of data and test subjects that just aren't practical in day to day research.
cwkoss 9y ago
I think there are a lot more interesting superfoods. Stinging nettles are amazing: 30% protein by dry weight, incredibly dense with vitamins and minerals, stingers contain human-compatible neurotransmitters. Also, the baby plants are most nutritious and can't sting you yet!
- KGIII 9y ago
  What is the benefit of containing neurotransmitters? I hit up Wikipedia and see they carry signals. I'm not seeing how that is a benefit, however. They appear to carry any signal, not some special signals. Unless one has too few (I'm not sure what might even cause that) then I'm not seeing why that's beneficial.
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    I don't think they can cross the blood brain barrier, but I think I've read that some can get partially metabolized into a precursor, travel across the BBB, and then re-assembled within the brain. Probably not particularly necessary for healthy individuals, but could reduce the amount of work needed to synthesize your own transmitters (few steps rather than 'from scratch'). Perhaps some individuals with neurotransmitter deficits could see benefit. As I'm sure you can tell though, I'm not a trained neuroscientist.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Hmm... If I'm understanding correctly, they might possible be bound to opiate molecules and increase efficacy in hitting the receptors? That makes some sense. By itself, I can't think of how it would benefit a healthy person. I'm not even sure what kinds of unhealthy people that might help. So, to me it looked like, 'Hey, here are some fancy words! Don't look too deep, because they are mostly meaningless.' No offense intended, that's just what it looked like to a curious layman. I have a commercial wild blueberry operation so I hear some really, really strange claims. Things like this peg my skepticism meter. No, my blueberries won't turn you into Superman or Einstein. They don't cure cancer, prevent HIV, or give you psychic powers.
tmnvix 9y ago
If potatoes were not commonplace, they would be declared a 'superfood'.

34 points by found_reading 9y ago

Whenever someone talks about "superfoods" I immediately think they are full of shit. It's just an attempt to make something simple (normal food) into something expensive to make money from. Same happened to exercise. The basics of exercise haven't changed in a long time but you still have people repackaging it to make money.

eatbitseveryday 9y ago
Most of these happenings, in my opinion, just take advantage of consumer ignorance. Getting your advice about anything in life from product advertising is what advertisers want.
wlesieutre 9y ago
It's an extra bummer because they price things higher when there's a market of customers saying "If I keep chugging this pomegranate juice I'll never get cancer, it's got antioxidants!" Some of us just wanted to drink that because it tastes good...
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  "antioxidants" is also on my bullshit list
  - sushid 9y ago
    What? Sure, don't buy the marketing hype but antioxidants ingested via food (as oppposed to pills) is supposed to be beneficial to you. When you say it's "on your bullshit list" do you mean you don't believe in things like free radicals? Or do you mean that you don't think there's antioxidants in abundant supply in said product?
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      I believe that food can't be reduced to one ingredient. If something contains antioxidants but also a ton of sugar or other stuff you have take that into account too and see if the net effect is positive or negative. You can't just say food with antioxidants is good for you. It's like eating organic chocolate. It's maybe a little better than regular but it's still chocolate with a ton of sugar so net it's not good for you.
    - Symmetry 9y ago
      There are sound theoretical reasons to think that antioxidant ingestion ought to be good for you and the antioxidants in your body are certainly important. But all the research I've seen on the matter is that ingesting extra antioxidants has the opposite of the effect you'd expect. I'd guess this is some homeostasis related interaction but I don't think anybody actually knows why.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      Even if antioxidants are good for you, I can't see a cup of juice being the optimal way to get them. 160 calories / 8 oz serving. As far as antioxidants themselves are concerned, if you do go the pills route, be sure it's not too much. High levels are linked to increased cancer risk, which is the opposite of what people are going for. How much is too much? I dunno, but I figure the amount I get from drinking tea isn't going to kill me.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  Actually there are studies demonstrating that pomegranate improves blood circulation - and for me that's the main reason to use it. Antioxidants etc. is just bullshit. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146683/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146683/
whathaschanged 9y ago
Coconut water is repackaged waste byproduct that someone figured out how to make money off of. It's classic marketing.
- padthai 9y ago
  Coconut water was always very popular as soft drink in producing countries. Not waste.
  - blowski 9y ago
    In Brazil, it’s a traditional remedy if you have a bad stomach. It’s also sold at a lot of tourist destinations fresh from the coconut as it’s very refreshing.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Common, but in somewhat limited quantities. "Anecdotal sources describe coconut water is used in India for the senicide of elderly people, a procedure known as thalaikoothal.[13] In this custom, the elderly person is made to drink an excessive amount of coconut water, eventually resulting in fever and death, the exact causes of which have not been determined.[13]"
    - pera 9y ago
      In Brazil is extremely common, at least in the south: during the summer you can buy cold green coconuts pretty much everywhere, but specially in the coast; I used to drink it almost daily.
    - mturmon 9y ago
      I'm not sure what your point is here. It's well-known that green coconut vendors are very common in India (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tender_coconut_vendor_in_India.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tender_coconut_vendo...). They have a cart of coconuts, chop the top off of one as you watch, and hand it to you to drink. As a tourist, it seemed to me to be safer than drinking water. So, to the original point above, coconut water is not waste, and is quite refreshing, and fills a useful niche if you're worried about stomach bugs.
baldfat 9y ago
Superfoods is a marketing term. I love saying you know what is a superfood? Beans and mushrooms and they say no thank you and walk away with their seaweed and chia smoothie. "'The term "superfoods" is at best meaningless and at worst harmful,' said Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London. 'There are so many wrong ideas about superfoods that I don't know where best to begin to dismantle the whole concept.'" https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/13/health.healthandwellbeing1 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/13/health.healthandw... PS My WIFE says superfood at least 3 times a week and I have a ton of Chia and Quinoa in my kitchen I like the taste of them and my wife feels healthy. I bought them on Amazon in bulk and were super cheap. Now if I could only get her to stop juicing!!!!!!! UGH that is the worst! Ginger and Prickly Pear with God knows what else!
misterHN 9y ago
In California, the problem is quite serous. There is a food cartel that runs on undocumented labor. The California food industry maintains artificially high prices because the people in it are racists. These sick people will do anything to manipulate their victims, including using words like "superfood" to trick them into a false sense of security.

jerf 9y ago

"Sales of coconut water have skyrocketed in the past two years, and anecdotally, several fitness buffs interviewed by Marketplace said they believe it hydrates better than tap water." That's... that's a tall bar. "Provides more electrolytes" than water, sure. "More energizing than water", sure. But hydrates better than water? Though a charitable reading of the fitness buff's claim could be that it's "better for someone working out than water", which, again, is at least possible as there are more dimensions than just "hydration" there.

Darmani 9y ago
Both energy drinks and milk absorb better than water. Doesn't seem odd that coconut water is in the and category.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Doesn't matter. Even if I only absorbed 90% of the water I drank, I could just drink 1.111 L of water to get 1 L of "hydration", and it would still be cheaper than drinking 1 L of Brawndo, the Thirst Annihilator. On a money cost basis, in any place on Earth that has municipal drinking water on tap, drinking that water is the cheapest way to hydrate your body. Whether or not "best" includes the money cost is a matter of opinion, but most people at least include it as a factor. The same goes for a lot of "superfoods". On a cost basis, whatever you get from 100g of the "superfood" can probably be obtained by eating 200g of something else, sold at a much lower price. Or it's only of interest to vegans, because the "something else" is an animal product. People on western diets just aren't limited by nutrition content. If you eat your normal calorie quota--even a reduced quota from a weight-loss diet--you can always get adequate nutrition from just the normal, healthy, non-"super" foods. There's nothing stopping you from eating a bucketful of broccoli with a bit of salmon, and skipping the wheatgrass-kale-chia-pomegranate super-smoothies forever.
  - nrenegar 9y ago
    But Brawndo's got electrolytes.
- 9y ago

will_brown 9y ago

They seem to be making strangely isolated measurements that have little to do with the claimed benefits of the alleged superfoods. For starters I think most people agree there is no need to replace electrolytes during endurance activities that do not exceed 1 hour, oddly the length of time in this study. I’m not sure anyone claims coconut water hydrates better than water, but certainly it’s going to be more beneficial for replacing lost electrolytes. Personally, I’d like to see a study regarding coconut milk vs water and the hydration effects on the intestines themselves, my hypothesis would be intestines hydrated with coconut milk more readily absorb vitamins and nutrients from other foods than intestines hydrated with just water, either way it would be an interesting experiment. As to chia seeds being compared to salmon, that alone should probably confirm their status as a food rich in omega 3 fatty acids, as salmon is one of the best sources of omega 3 fatty acids. But what’s the use case? As a runner I am more inclined to drink water or coconut milk with a teaspoon of soaked chia seeds rather than run with a belly full of salmon, but for dinner I’d rather have a plate of salmon than a teaspoon of chia seed. And omega 3s are not the sole benefit of chia seeds, As natures form of time release capsules they will provide some degree of continued hydration during long runs from the liquid they were soaked in that salmon will not. It seems they could have measured the hydrating effects of the chia seed vs the salmon, but instead they only seem to focus on the percent of omega 3 obsorption of chia vs salmon, but as I said these were oddly isolated measurements.

gxs 9y ago
Once you start getting into this type of thinking it's really easy to go down a rabbit hole. I'd love to see the same research, but if you start digging into this subject you will be disappointed in the answers you get. After researching this stuff as a hobby for some time, I've come to the conclusion that this stuff is not well understood and there is still a lot left to explore. As technical people, we sometimes look for something along the lines of hey - this is the chemical composition of something, balance some equations and figure out the affect it has on our body chemistry. This is just an exmaple, of course it's simplified and not quite accurate. Unfortunately it's not that simple and doing this kind of research requires a ton of data and test subjects that just aren't practical in day to day research.

cwkoss 9y ago

I think there are a lot more interesting superfoods. Stinging nettles are amazing: 30% protein by dry weight, incredibly dense with vitamins and minerals, stingers contain human-compatible neurotransmitters. Also, the baby plants are most nutritious and can't sting you yet!

KGIII 9y ago
What is the benefit of containing neurotransmitters? I hit up Wikipedia and see they carry signals. I'm not seeing how that is a benefit, however. They appear to carry any signal, not some special signals. Unless one has too few (I'm not sure what might even cause that) then I'm not seeing why that's beneficial.
- cwkoss 9y ago
  I don't think they can cross the blood brain barrier, but I think I've read that some can get partially metabolized into a precursor, travel across the BBB, and then re-assembled within the brain. Probably not particularly necessary for healthy individuals, but could reduce the amount of work needed to synthesize your own transmitters (few steps rather than 'from scratch'). Perhaps some individuals with neurotransmitter deficits could see benefit. As I'm sure you can tell though, I'm not a trained neuroscientist.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Hmm... If I'm understanding correctly, they might possible be bound to opiate molecules and increase efficacy in hitting the receptors? That makes some sense. By itself, I can't think of how it would benefit a healthy person. I'm not even sure what kinds of unhealthy people that might help. So, to me it looked like, 'Hey, here are some fancy words! Don't look too deep, because they are mostly meaningless.' No offense intended, that's just what it looked like to a curious layman. I have a commercial wild blueberry operation so I hear some really, really strange claims. Things like this peg my skepticism meter. No, my blueberries won't turn you into Superman or Einstein. They don't cure cancer, prevent HIV, or give you psychic powers.

tmnvix 9y ago

If potatoes were not commonplace, they would be declared a 'superfood'.