Are Superfood Promotions False?

The vast majority of propaganda that exaggerates efficacy falls into the category of false propaganda. Only content that strictly limits applicable scenarios and only states objective differences in nutritional content can be considered factual.

A while ago, my mother squatted in the health broadcast room and grabbed three large cans of chia seeds. The anchor patted her chest and said, "Eat on an empty stomach to lose 8 pounds in a week, and even diabetics can eat well." As a result, she ate for half a month and lost no weight, because she drank too much each time and the dietary fiber intake was not enough. If your food exceeds the standard, you have to go to the toilet with bloating every day, and you go to the merchant to argue, they just throw out a line in the corner of the details page, "Effectiveness varies from person to person, this product is not a substitute for medicines", and you can't find any reason - this is the routine practice of most super food promotions nowadays.

In fact, it’s not that “superfoods” themselves are all IQ taxes. When I was doing sports nutrition guidance, I made meal plans for friends preparing for the marathon. When I supplemented potassium and high-quality vegetable protein after the game, I would indeed give priority to recommending ingredients such as kale and quinoa, compared with the same weight of lettuce and rice. , the density of certain types of nutrients in them is indeed much higher. For people who need precise nutritional supplements, the efficiency is indeed higher than eating ordinary ingredients. This is why the concept of "super food" was first spread from the sports nutrition circle. It is a dietary reference for professionals.

But the problem is that after it came out of the circle, this concept was directly ruined by merchants. Take the acai berry powder that was so popular in the past two years that it was out of stock. The slogans all say, "Anthocyanins are 10 times more than blueberries. Drinking them will make your skin whiter, anti-aging and reduce wrinkles." But if you check the clinical research data, in order for anthocyanins to achieve measurable antioxidant and whitening effects, ordinary people must consume at least 150 mg of pure anthocyanins a day. You need to eat about 3 kilograms of fresh acai berries. After drying into powder, at least half of the active ingredients are lost. Each time you make a spoonful of less than 5g of powder, the anthocyanins that can be replenished are not as much as if you eat a small box of blueberries. This kind of sneaky concept and the propaganda that directly equates "high nutrient content" with "eating has effects" is not false. I have even seen something even more outrageous. Ordinary spinach is dried and ground into powder called "super chlorophyll powder". The price is 20 times more expensive than fresh spinach, and consumers are treated like leeks.

Of course, there are also colleagues who do popular science who feel that they don’t need to be beaten to death with a stick. For example, a pediatric nutrition blogger I know said that for those young people who can't eat a bite of green leafy vegetables for a week and live on fried chicken and cola outside every meal, buying kale powder produced by a regular manufacturer and without added sugar and mixing it with milk is better than not consuming any chlorophyll or dietary fiber. In this case, as long as the merchants don't brag about the efficacy and just objectively say "supplementing dietary fiber", it is indeed not false.

Moreover, our country actually does not recognize the official concept of "super food" at all. The advertising law also clearly requires that ordinary food cannot promote any treatment or health effects. Now, if you see the four words "super food" followed by the words "slimming, hypoglycemic, anti-aging" on product packaging or promotional pages, go directly to 12315 to report it, and we will check it out.

When I go to the supermarket and encounter ingredients with "superfood" labels, I will buy them, but I never have the expectation that "eating them will make you healthier." I just treat them as a supplement to ordinary ingredients - when I don't want to cook multi-grain rice, I make some quinoa flakes for breakfast, which adds more protein than white porridge.； If you're too lazy to mix a salad on the weekends, just make a spoonful of kale powder to save yourself the trouble of washing a lot of vegetables. After all, if you really want to be healthy, you need a long-term balanced diet and regular work and rest. How can there be any super food that will be effective after just one bite? Those fantastic propagandas simply capture the mentality of ordinary people who want to "take shortcuts".