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About those ’Superfoods’ — never mind |
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Written by J.M. HIRSCH, asap
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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 |
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 As concepts go, “superfoods” is about a year beyond its “use by” date. Time to yank it off the shelf before it gets even more rancid.
It’s easy to understand why it has hung around as long as it has. What an attractive notion. Eat enough of one, two, maybe even 10 power-packed foods and end up with a supercharged immune system capable of fending off colds, cancer and the odd case of scurvy.
If only it were true.
If you’ve built your diet around blueberries or cranberries or broccoli or soy (or whatever today’s headlines scream) in hopes of hitting your body’s “turbo boost” button, you need to embrace a simple horror -- there are no superfoods.
 There are foods that are good for you (cue the blueberries). There are foods that are less good for you (whole fat dairy, anyone?). There are blissfully benign foods (celery?). And there are foods you shouldn’t even feed the dog (you’re probably munching one now).
But there are no superfoods.
Of course, food packaging and industry claims tend to obscure this fact. No matter how warm and fuzzy the ad language, it has nothing to do with concern for your health, and everything to do with selling you lots of berry-flavored wheatgrass energy bars.
To that end, most have adopted language that could double as advertising for high-end computers.
As I write this, I am sipping a juice that claims to have an “extremely high ORAC score of 2,466 per ounce, equivalent to three to four servings of fruit.” I have no idea what that means, but I sure wish my motherboard could make the same boast.
The reality is horribly unsexy and oh-so-grandmotherly -- moderation. Eat a little of everything, move some, and you’ll be fine.
It’s curious (but hardly shocking) that as a society we are so willing to embrace silver bullet nutrition, but so reluctant to consider common sense. It’s so much more fun to think that eating a few pounds of mangos a day will work wonders.
The entertaining aspect of the superfood mythology is how foods come in and out of fashion.
A few years ago it was the blueberry. More antioxidants than any other food to fend off those cursed free radicals. Then it was pomegranates. Same claims, different color juice. Then the impossible-to-pronounce acai, with tons of amino-something-or-others.
Most recently it’s been the mangosteen, yet another tropical fruit with supposed healing properties. I’m sipping some at the moment and thanks to its dual CPU and Ultra SATA drive, my immune system should be revved for a month.
Of course, all these foods land squarely in the “good for you” column. Many just get all the ink because they’re exotic and people think that if some tribe in the Amazon has been eating it, it must be good for them.
But corn and carrots are good for you, too. So is chicken soup. And even a little ice cream.
The harsh reality is that the most pressing dietary concern facing Americans isn’t that they aren’t slurping enough mangosteen-blueberry-acai-soy smoothies. Rather, it’s that they don’t eat enough variety. And what they do eat, they eat too much of.
It’s telling that the most common vegetable in most toddlers’ diets is the potato. If only the potato industry had been bright enough to jump on the antioxidant-fueled superfood bandwagon, Tater Tots could be touted as health food.
———
asap columnist J.M. Hirsch covers food, diet and nutrition for the AP. E-mail him at jhirschap.org.
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