Over the last few years, A LOT has been said about the existence, the advantages and the drawbacks of “superfoods”. From nuts, wholegrain bread and olive oil to fresh fruits and vegetables like avocado,bananas, tomatoes or blueberries, and even foodstuffs rich in proteins and fatty acids like eggs, salmon or mackerel, antioxidant-rich foods have inevitably led to a dispute between alternative medicine practitioners and food sellers, who claim that they can have miraculous health benefits, and medical experts, that perceive them as a mere marketing tool with little scientific basis to it. In my opinion, these alleged superfoods are quite overrated, being often praised without a completely unquestionable reason to support them, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, recent studies, made by CONSECRATED experts in nutrition, have shown that the most important THING people should focus on is their diet and lifestyle as a whole and not believe in the claimed superpower status of some foodstuffs. In this rushed and hectic world we live in, the task of having a richly varied and balanced diet, managing carefully our stress and exercising regularly has become rather difficult to accomplish, therefore we tend to rely excessively on just few foods that we consider capable of resolving our health’s imbalances,which is exactly the main idea the concept of superfood suggests. The truth is that our biggest mistake consists precisely in this tendency. For example, eating only goji berries,chia seeds,dark chocolate or raw vegetables,drinking only  plain water and depriving ourselves from foods containing lipids and proteins,like milk or meat, will result in weight loss and a bigger intake of vitamins, but also in the emergence of some diet-related diseases, like tetany or anemia. Consequently, the damage that this kind of lifestyle could bring to our body is much more significant than the small benefits of certain types of food.
Secondly, the increasing popularity of superfoods all over the world has turned them into the perfect marketing tool, designed to bring as much money as possible to the leaders of the food and advertising industries. After the appearance of the idea of foods that can make miracles through a book written by Michael Van Straten in the early 1990s, thousands of dietary supplements, diet plans, specialized cookbooks and nutritional drinks have been launched, promoting a great variety of products, from common foods, accessible to everyone and rich in antioxidants, like spinach, cherries or grapes, to strange, overpriced exotic foodstuffs, like the monk fruit, green coffee beans, kale or the açai fruit,THEIR [pune “whose”, ca devine greoi cu “being”]success BEING ensured by hiring numerous athletes or television celebrities to endorse them, thus determining huge sales of these products and sometimes creating real hysteria.For example, in 2009, when Oprah Winfrey‘s image was illegally used to advertise the açai berry, thousands of personal computers in America HAVE BEEN damaged because people had unknowingly clicked on a malware infected  advertisement. As a result, since then,over 50 manufacturers have been sued for defamation and people have stopped buying açai related products.
Admittedly, eating these antioxidant-rich superfoods and taking nutritional supplements can help to reduce the risk of cancer and other incurable diseases and to improve our health status. However, researchers have recently found that the supplements‘compounds are not well absorbed by the human body at all and that it is unlikely that any single food will make a major difference on our health on its own.
In conclusion, it is not a mistake to eat the types of food mentioned above, as long as we DON’T exaggerate and turn them into the main elements of our daily diet. In order to have a healthy body and a strong immunity, we have to learn to adopt a balanced lifestyle, in which our diet, mental tranquility and physical activity could blend harmoniously.