List of Super Foods

There is currently no globally unified and authoritative list of superfoods. All the claims that "eating a certain superfood can provide antioxidants, prevent aging, and cure all diseases" are all marketing gimmicks. Foods with high cost performance and high nutrient density that are truly suitable for ordinary Chinese people are all common ones that can be bought in the wet market downstairs.

To be honest, I paid a lot of IQ taxes when I first started working out two years ago. I stocked half a cabinet of imported chia seeds, organic acai berry powder, and Peruvian quinoa. In the end, they either expired or were thrown away after eating them twice. Later, after chatting with a nutritionist friend, I found out that the nutrition community has been arguing for almost ten years about whether superfoods are a pseudo-concept. One group believes that this is completely created by food manufacturers and sold at a premium. There is no single food that can cover all nutritional needs. Instead of pursuing a single food, it is better to achieve a balanced diet. ； The other group thinks that the concept itself is fine. It can be used to refer to foods whose vitamin, mineral, dietary fiber, and antioxidant content are much higher than average for the same amount of calories, helping everyone to quickly select cost-effective ingredients. What both schools say makes sense. The core thing is that you just don’t be dazzled by the premium. I tend to lean towards the latter school, but the prerequisite is to squeeze out the IQ tax.

The vitamin K content per 100 grams of kale that has been so popular before is more than three times the recommended daily amount, and vitamins A and C are indeed not low. But if you can't get used to the smell of raw grass, there is really no need to hold your nose and drink a smoothie that is so unpleasant that you will vomit. The vitamin C content of the rapeseed we often eat per 100 grams is 10 mg higher than that of kale, and the iron content is 1.5 times that of kale. It tastes good no matter how you eat it, stir-fry, make soup, or cook noodles, because the oxalic acid is destroyed when cooked, and the iron absorption rate is much higher than eating raw kale. My best friend drank kale juice every day for three days and had diarrhea for three days in order to follow the trend. Later, she switched to stir-fried rapeseed. She got the folic acid and dietary fiber she needed, and she was still happy eating.

Many people like to buy imported frozen blueberries. A box of 20 to 30 yuan only costs two or three meals. In fact, the fresh mulberries sold in the summer market for 10 yuan per pound have 1.5 times the anthocyanin content and 4 times the vitamin C content of blueberries. Wash them well and throw them into yogurt, or make some cold brew tea. The sweet and sour taste is much better than blueberries that have been frozen for more than half a year. If there are no fresh mulberries in winter, ordinary domestically produced fresh kiwis have a higher nutrient density, are more than half the price of imported kiwis sold with foreign labels for 30 yuan each, and taste even sweeter.

Of course, this does not mean that imported superfoods are not good. If you like to eat yogurt soaked in chia seeds, and you are not short of money, you can buy it as you like, but there is no need to think that eating expensive foods is healthy. For example, quinoa, which has been touted as the "fat-reducing staple food", does have higher protein content than ordinary rice. However, I didn't soak it for enough time the first time I cooked it, and my stomach was bloated all afternoon after eating it. Later I learned that the skin of quinoa contains saponins. If it is not cooked thoroughly, it is particularly unfriendly to people with weak stomachs. In fact, the dietary fiber and B vitamin content of our oats, millet, and sticky corn from the Northeast is no worse than that of quinoa, and the glycemic index is even lower. For people with weak stomachs, it is much more comfortable to make a bowl of millet porridge in the morning than to swallow the cooked quinoa rice.

There’s another pitfall that many people fall into: don’t think that eating a few bites of superfoods can offset the disadvantages of staying up late and eating junk food. A while ago, I had a colleague who ate avocado salad for lunch every day. He said that avocado is a super food and can lower blood lipids. However, he stayed up until 2 o'clock every day to watch TV dramas. He also ate hot pot and barbecue twice in a row on weekends. Last week, his blood lipids were still over the limit during the physical examination. Do you think it was unfair? The essence of superfoods is still food, not magic medicine. If your work and rest are disordered and your diet is overall unbalanced, it will be useless no matter how much you eat.

If I really wanted to make a practical "list", I would only write three lines:

1. You can easily buy it at the food market/supermarket downstairs

2. You don’t feel uncomfortable eating and are willing to eat it for a long time

3. High cost performance, no need to spend a lot of money to buy on behalf of others

If it meets these three conditions, it is your super food. There is no need to follow the foreign lists on the Internet and buy it blindly. After all, only the food that you can insist on eating is really useful.