Of Superfoods and Superfads
Where’s the line? How too much of a good thing can become…less good…and even downright unappetizing.
By Sarah Souli
There’s a brand of yogurt sold in Greek supermarkets by the Kri Kri company called “Superspoon.” Each 200 gram package contains, the label proclaims in a loud, bold font, high protein yogurt and superfruits. What’s a superfruit? According to this company, it’s apparently blueberries and bananas, two fruits so pedestrian they are taught to preschoolers learning the alphabet.
Kri Kri is far from being the only company in the world to slap “super” labels onto packaging to encourage sales The oldest record of the term “superfood” comes, surprisingly, from a poem in a Jamaican newspaper during World War I, which referred to wine’s ability to make life something extra. The second usage came after World War II, when a Canadian newspaper praised the nutritional qualities of muffins.
These days, neither alcohol nor muffins feature prominently as superfoods. Instead, as the word has become increasingly fashionable, we’re more likely to see the term refer to exotic foodstuffs whose names trip up the tongue: kombucha, maca, acai, goji, and quinoa. “Superfood” is now meant to refer to foods that have a higher nutritional property, or higher antioxidants, than other foods, though it’s largely a baseless claim.
“The field of nutrition is primed for these gimmicks because manufacturers know there are a lot of people looking for silver bullets,” registered dietician Andy Bellatti explained to Civil Eats. “The term ‘superfood’ as we know it today is silly because it is basically code for ‘grown 15,000 miles away in a remote mountain range and sold at a premium.’ As far as I am concerned, all whole, minimally processed, plant-based foods are superfoods. Are goji berries healthy? Sure. So is an orange.”
The word “superfood” is similar to the label “natural” in that its use is not regulated, and there’s no official or legal definition of the phrase. In 2007, the European Union banned the use of the term superfood on product labels, unless sellers can clearly provide a concrete health claim. Of course, each country and culture has its own history of eating and using superfoods, without slapping on any labels. In Greece, strained yogurt — now sold around the world as high-protein, super yogurt — has simply been a normal part of an everyday diet. There was nothing particularly super about it, it was just yogurt, full of probiotics that regulated digestion.
“The term ‘superfoods’ is at best meaningless and at worst harmful. There are so many wrong ideas about superfoods that I don’t know where best to begin to dismantle the whole concept,” Catherine Collins, chief dietitian at St George’s Hospital in London, exasperatedly stated. In Collins’ home country, 61 percent of Britons reported buying food because it was specifically labeled as “superfood.”
That translates to a lot of money, which is good business for some producers and companies. In 1998, Oregon’s blueberry production was a respectable 17 million pounds. By 2016, the state was producing 100 million pounds, largely thanks to the marketing appeal of blueberries as an antioxidant packed superfood that prevents cancer (it’s more complicated). Oregon has the capabilities to increase production without having a damaging effect on the state, but the outcome is often more complicated for other superfood producers.
Quinoa, the tiny, nutty grain that has sustained communities across the Andes mountains for thousands of years, is primarily grown in Bolivia and Peru. It’s a culturally important food for these communities, and in conjunction with other native and foreign plants, has provided people with a solid nutritional base. Given quinoa’s nutrient properties, and its particularly high levels of protein, it quickly achieved superfood status in the West, and between 2006 and 2013, the price of quinoa tripled.
The resulting media frenzy prompted two American economists to take a closer look at the data, and in a paper published in 2016 they concluded that “the claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it [is] patently false.”That doesn’t mean that other issues don’t exist: as demand rises, so too must production. In Bolivia, farmers’ soil is suffering as a result: land hasn’t been allowed a traditional resting production, leading to soil erosion and loss of nutrients; and as farmers have focused on quinoa growing they’ve reduced their llama herds, leading to a decrease in manure to fertilize the soil.
It’s deeply ironic that as people buy more of a certain product because of its nutritional properties, those nutritional properties actually decrease. But perhaps that doesn’t matter: tastes are fickle and sellers and consumers are constantly looking for the next big superfood. Be prepared to crunch on watermelon seeds, sip chaga mushroom tea, and snack on maqui berries. They’re all expected to be the year’s next big superfood trend, claiming to do everything from combating muscle fatigue to boosting the immune system.
A shot of liquified algae fat, anyone?
Sarah Souli is a contributing editor to the Journal of Beautiful Business.
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