This term became very popular in the past 5 years and the rise of various detox shakes and nutri-boost drinks and diet plans. What people don't realize (or hopefully do realize) is that most of these products don't actually do any of what they say they will do and many of them actually have harmful side-effects that the manufacturers don't even tell you about. I wonder why that would be?
This is just another episode in the ever-evolving lie that is a majority of the diet, fitness, and nutrition world. I'll showcase a few examples here, but of course there are many many more.
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Wheatgrass juice
A good sign that something is a completely bogus product is if you have spent your whole life being a human with a functioning brain and have never heard of something ever being mentioned until it becomes an additive at every Jamba Juice - like establishment on the planet. The claims made about wheatgrass vary, but most of them don't hold any water at all or at the minimum are hugely exaggerated.
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One of the most ridiculous claims I have seen about this product is that it contains as much nutrients as a kilogram of vegetables. While this may be true in a very controlled statistical way by comparing the fiber content in wheatgrass (high fiber content) to another vegetable such as cucumbers that are very low in fiber... In this scenario the kg = 1 shot analogy might be correct (I have zero desire to look it up) but what is actually happening is that people who don't eat enough fruit and vegetables take the statement literally - that one shot of wheatgrass in their super-sugary and waaaay overpriced Jamba Juice is somehow going to magically be all the vegetable-oriented nutrition that they need for the day because it's the sAmE aS a WhOlE kIlO oF vEgEtAbLeS!
If you want a little added vegetable nutrition in a shake I say go for it, just don't be a dumb ass about it.
Soy Products
Soy came out of nowhere a few years ago and became mainstream in basically every product imaginable. No longer a food of vegans and hippies soy was being included in almost anything you can imagine. The FDA recently gave the soy industry permission to label all of their products as "heart healthy" due to soy's amazing ability to prevent heart disease - a claim that is dubious at best and can once again, only be replicated in a laboratory environment.
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The claims are so coincidentally connected in studies that the FDA at one point back in 2017 considered, and may have actually carried through with, revoking this stamp that soy products have any affect on heart health whatsoever.
“Our review of that evidence has led us to conclude that the relationship between soy protein and heart disease does not meet the rigorous standard for an FDA-authorized health claim.”
Is soy heart healthy? Well, I dunno because it depends a lot on what else you are eating. If you suck down buckets of lard as an alternative to eating soy products then yeah, of course it is and this is the sort of loaded studies that the soy industry was carrying out (I am obviously exaggerating, but hopefully you get the point.)
The soy industry also doesn't disclose that unfermented soy protein contains high levels of something called phytoestrogens, which is a type of estrogen and leads to diminished testosterone levels and libido in men. Don't tell anyone in Seattle about this, or they will react violently... kinda.
Soy also contains phytic acid, which is capable of blocking certain minerals from being absorbed in your body at all and this is never a good thing.
Soy is no better or worse than any other plant but the fact of the matter is that after tens of thousands of years of evolution, our bodies were not meant to take on such mass quantities of it and therefore, making a soy substitute of everything is not the best idea. Soy is not a superfood and since their main claim of it being heart friendly is mostly unfounded, I don't see any particular reason to resort to using it especially since soy milk tastes like you are drinking regular milk with dirt in it.
At the end of the day there are no shortcuts to health and fitness. You need variety and the good 'ol "balanced diet" that we heard about our whole lives before the internet started making people feel the need to change everything once every couple of years.
Superfoods are for the most part, marketing bullcrap that was put out there (coincidentally I'm sure) by the industries that grow and sell these products... imagine that!
Eat mainly whole foods, avoid processed sugars, exercise a bit, and don't smoke. Job done!
You can do it!