Can superfoods be used in advertising?

According to my country's current advertising supervision rules, "super food" cannot be directly used as a promotional expression in official commercial advertisements. If the red line is touched, at least it will be required to be removed from the shelves, and in more severe cases, it will be fined for false advertising. Last year, there was a health food e-commerce brand in Hangzhou. On the product details page of kale powder, it was marked as "natural super food, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant to improve immunity." After complaints from consumers, not only was all relevant promotional materials removed from the shelves, but it was also fined 210,000 yuan, and the brand's annual credit rating was also affected.

However, from the perspective of many food practitioners, this regulation is somewhat unclear. After all, the concept of "superfood" has been used overseas for decades. Many nutritional sciences will also use it to refer to categories such as quinoa, chia seeds, and blueberries that have a much higher nutritional density than ordinary ingredients. They do not directly claim to cure diseases, so why is it illegal?

In fact, the problem lies in the fact that there is no unified official definition and quantitative standard for "super food" - you said that prickly pear, which contains three times as much vitamin C as ordinary oranges, is considered a super food, but does ordinary juice with vitamin C effervescent tablets count? Without a clear yardstick, it is easy for merchants to put ordinary ingredients under this name and sell them at a premium. It is also easy for ordinary consumers to equate "super" with "with special effects" and accidentally pay the IQ tax. To put it bluntly, this word is now like a "certificate of excellence" without an official seal. Anyone can print it and stick it on the product, but in the end it is the person who pays for it.

Nowadays, food brand colleagues have basically figured out the boundaries. The word will definitely not be used in official materials such as hard advertisements, product main images, and detail pages. However, in soft content scenarios such as live broadcast chats, Xiaohongshu grass notes, and private community science popularization, it is okay to mention a few sentences occasionally, provided that it cannot be bound to any efficacy claims. If you follow the "super food" and say it can lower blood sugar and help weight loss, no matter what channel you post it on, you will be targeted and you will be punished. As for whether it will be relaxed in the future? It is estimated that we have to wait for the relevant nutritional standards to be released and set clear entry thresholds for "super foods". Otherwise, if we let it go rashly, it will most likely only lead to more gimmick products that cut leeks.