Superfoods

You’ll see me flip around my topics to you.

Sometimes I’ll focus on deeper issues related to eating, body image and relationship with food, and sometimes I just want to get down and dirty back to my nutritional roots and share some of the hottest nutrition questions I get from YOU.

So today, let’s do that……

What the heck are “Superfoods” anyway?

A “Superfood” is just a marketing term to label nutrient powerhouse foods that pack large doses of antioxidants, polyphenols, vitamins, and minerals. There is no legal or medical definition for what constitutes a superfood. You will often see companies highlighting a highly nutritional food in their product as a “superfood” because it gets your nutritional attention.

Examples of superfoods range from the everyday, common kind of food like:
Sweet potatoes | Blueberries | Walnuts | Spinach | Sardines

To the more uncommon, exotic and sexy foods like:
Goji Berries | Maca Root | Chia Seeds | Wheatgrass | Hempseed

Is all the hype around them worth going out of my way to get some?

Yes, with conditions.

Why yes…

Adding more nutrient dense food into your diet is always a good idea for two reasons:

1) Getting more nutrients out of each bite of food certainly helps sustain long-term health, build the blood and keep your systems running as smooth as a baby’s behind.

2) The reality is that the more nutritional foods you eat, the less non-nutritional (junk) you eat. Eating a greater quantity of higher-density nutritional foods will slowly help crowd out the cravings for, and ultimate injestion of, processed foods.

Why yes, with a condition attached…

The media has us believing that any one “superfood” is going to be the holy grail for healing an aspect of our health, or losing weight, and that, to be very honest, is bogus-ness.

In all my years of helping folks lose weight and clear up chronic health concerns, I’ve never seen that just adding goji berries to the diet, or making the one shift of eating more walnuts gets them what they want.

Nutritional therapy (changing your diet to shift a physical health/weight concern) is not a one-shot deal. It involves looking at the WHOLE PICTURE – the patterns, the timing, what is actually going in your body in any specific time frame and especially what is NOT going in your body in any particular time period.

So please don’t get caught up in the superfood hype to think that any one food is the holy grail for the health and body changes you want.

What I can suggest is to try adding one or two, slowly, into your diet. Then add another. And at the same time, take a food, or diet pattern, out, that you know is more processed and not serving you so much nutritionally.

So perhaps you replace a daily snack of a processed protein bar with a smoothie with chia and flax seeds in it.

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ps. Do you have a nutritional question for me? Send it!

Go here to our contact page and ask me anything you want about food, weight or health. I may not be able to help you, though, on how to get your mom to stop asking you what you ate for dinner.

You just may see your question in the next Mini-Digestible post :)

2 Comments

  1. Thanks Cynthia – I never really understood what this was all about. I want more nutritional topics, too, when you can.

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