The origin of the concept of superfoods

Superfood, a concept that is now popular in fitness circles and on the homepages of health bloggers, is neither an academic term officially defined by the nutrition community, nor a food classification certified by a certain country’s food and drug regulatory authorities. Its earliest official origin is the marketing propaganda launched by the United Fruit Company in 1915 to dump bananas from Central American plantations.

When I was doing brand consulting in the imported food industry two years ago, in order to conduct a compliance review for a Peruvian maca that was going to enter the e-commerce platform, I combed through domestic and foreign food regulatory documents. The first cold fact I discovered was that no matter whether it was the Chinese Food and Drug Administration, the US FDA or the European Food Safety Authority, there had never been an official definition of "super food", and I couldn't even find the corresponding classification entry. To put it bluntly, it has not been an academic concept since its birth, but an out-and-out commercial product.

If we want to trace the origin, the first person recognized in the history of food marketing to formally introduce the concept of "superfood" was indeed the United Fruit Company in 1915. At that time, they controlled banana plantations in more than a dozen countries in Central America. The trans-oceanic cold chain transportation technology had just matured. A large number of bananas were shipped to the United States. The overcapacity was so bad that they could not be sold at the port. So they hired an advertising company to package the bananas and promoted the bananas as "containing four times more potassium than apples. They are easy to digest and will not irritate the gastrointestinal tract. They can be used by babies who have just added complementary foods to the elderly with bad teeth." "Super Food to Eat", hundreds of thousands of popular science brochures were printed and distributed in supermarkets, hospitals, and schools, and they even cooperated with the American Academy of Pediatrics to include bananas in the list of recommended complementary foods. In just three years, the per capita consumption of bananas in the United States tripled, and the word spread. By the 1930s, it had become a common word used to describe highly nutritious foods in European and American newspapers.

However, there are also many scholars who study food history who do not agree with this "marketing origin theory". They feel that similar concepts have existed for a long time. For example, "food is medicine" proposed by Hippocrates in ancient Greece, and the "medicine and food have the same origin" theory in my country's "Huangdi Neijing". In ancient times, ingredients with conditioning effects such as wolfberry and yam were even classified as "top grade". In essence, they emphasize the higher-than-average health value of some foods, but they are not uniformly called "super foods." This statement is not unreasonable. It is equivalent to calculating the core of the concept and the commercial shell separately, which is logically consistent.

The two views have actually been arguing for almost ten years. The essence is that they stand on different sides. People in the health food business feel that this term is originally a product of commercialization, and there is no need to dig into academic background. Now everyone has agreed to call super foods with high nutrient density and outstanding dietary fiber/antioxidant content than ordinary ingredients. Instead, it gives consumers a lazy standard for quick screening. You can't require everyone to memorize the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents" before buying food, right? Scholars in the field of public health are particularly disgusted with this concept. When I attended the nutrition annual meeting, a teacher from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention complained directly at the roundtable, saying that "superfoods" are the areas hardest hit by the IQ tax. The nutrients that can be obtained from a balanced diet must be packaged as scarce products and sold at high prices. Some merchants even boast that they can fight cancer and cure diabetes. This is completely false propaganda that treads on regulatory red lines.

When I conducted user research for clients last year, I interviewed more than two dozen consumers who often buy superfoods. Most of them are actually not easily fooled. I bought kale powder because I usually don’t have time to cook vegetables at 996, so I can add some dietary fiber by making a cup of it. ； I bought chia seeds because they are sticky when soaked and mixed with yogurt. They make you feel full and can keep you from being hungry all morning. To put it bluntly, what everyone buys is not "super" but convenience.

It’s quite interesting to say that bananas, which were first dubbed “superfoods”, have now been kicked out of this circle. After all, the price of a few yuan per pound cannot afford the premium of “high-end health care”. What can be called superfoods nowadays are either imported niche ingredients, or processed products made into powders and capsules. To put it bluntly, this concept has been tightly tied to business since the day it was born, and has never been a purely academic thing. If you really want to pursue health, instead of looking at the labels and buying expensive ones, it is better to eat two more bites of fresh vegetables, which is worse than anything else.