Here's what Daniel's getting at this week. He wants to talk about superfoods — that whole category of products that get marketed as nutritional overachievers. His read is that the responsible advice is actually pretty boring: antioxidants are in plenty of foods, lots of them not celebrated, and eating more vegetables and a mostly whole-foods diet is the smart move. But that doesn't stop people getting disproportionately excited about spirulina and wheatgrass. He thinks the superfood trend has cooled off a bit, though he's asking us to dig into what antioxidants actually are, how they fit within the broader universe of phytochemicals, and why drawing an artificial boundary around superfoods is basically anti-scientific — it narrows the list of foods people think they should eat and ultimately makes fairly little sense.
The trend hasn't cooled off. That's the first thing. The global superfoods market is projected at just over two hundred billion dollars this year, growing at eight point four percent. Daniel's perception that it's abated — I think what's actually happened is the term has become so diffuse and commoditized that people stop noticing it. It's wallpaper now. But the money's still moving.
Two hundred billion dollars for a category that has no scientific definition. That's impressive, in the way that a three-card monte game on a folding table is impressive.
It really doesn't have one. The term was invented for marketing in the nineties. Tara Schmidt, who's the lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet, says it flat out — superfoods is a term created for marketing. No regulatory definition exists anywhere. The EU effectively banned the word on packaging back in 2007 unless it's accompanied by a specific authorized health claim, and even that's just a labeling restriction, not a definition. The FDA never bothered with an equivalent rule.
So you can call anything a superfood in the US and nobody stops you.
Correct. And a 2022 study looked at forty-five webpages and found a hundred and thirty-six different foods designated as superfoods. At that point the category means nothing. It's just "foods someone wants to sell you."
A hundred and thirty-six. So roughly the number of things in my leaf medicine cabinet.
Your leaf medicine cabinet contains three dried eucalyptus sprigs and a jar of something you found under the sink.
Four sprigs. I restocked.
Let's start with what antioxidants actually are, because this is where the whole superfood story begins and it's also where the science has done a quiet U-turn that most people never heard about.
Quiet U-turn is a polite way to say the supplement industry built a multibillion-dollar business on a mechanism that doesn't work the way they told everyone it works.
Right. So antioxidants are compounds that delay or prevent oxidation — they stop other molecules from reacting with oxygen in ways that produce free radicals. The early biological work focused on vitamins A, C, and E preventing something called lipid peroxidation, which is basically fats going rancid inside your body. And the story that got sold to the public was beautifully simple: free radicals are bad, they cause aging and disease, antioxidants neutralize them, therefore more antioxidants equals better health. It's a video game logic — free radicals are the enemies, antioxidants are your health bar.
And that story is wrong.
It's not that it's entirely wrong — free radicals do cause oxidative damage, and that damage is implicated in a lot of diseases. The problem is the intervention. Giving people large doses of dietary antioxidant supplements doesn't produce the benefit the simple story predicts. Barry Halliwell, who's one of the foundational researchers in this field, named this the "antioxidant paradox" back in 2000. The mechanism is real, but the supplement intervention doesn't work. And in some cases it's actively harmful.
The Cochrane review.
Two thousand twelve. Seventy-eight randomized trials, just under three hundred thousand participants. They looked at antioxidant supplements — beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E. In the trials with low risk of bias, the supplements significantly increased mortality. Relative risk one point oh four. That's a four percent increase in the chance of dying during the study period. Small but statistically significant, and in the wrong direction.
So people were taking these things to live longer and the best evidence says they were slightly accelerating the opposite.
And that's the antioxidant paradox in one sentence. Halliwell's later work showed that the body's own antioxidant defense system is — his word — "complex, interlocking, and carefully regulated." You can't just dump more antioxidants on top and expect the system to work better. It's not a gas tank.
It's more like a thermostat. Adding more heat doesn't make the house warmer if the thermostat's already at the set point — the system compensates.
That's actually a decent analogy. And this is where phytochemicals come in, because antioxidants are just one subset of a vastly larger category. Phytochemicals are plant-derived bioactive compounds. Current estimates put the number of distinct phytochemicals at over a hundred thousand. Major classes include polyphenols — that's tannins, phenolic acids, lignans, stilbenes — then flavonoids like quercetin, kaempferol, catechins, anthocyanins. Carotenoids: beta-carotene, lycopene, lutein, zeaxanthin. Plus glucosinolates, alkaloids, and a bunch of others.
A hundred thousand compounds, and the superfood marketing machine decided to anoint about a hundred and thirty-six foods as special. That's not science. That's a rounding error with a PR budget.
And here's where the science has moved forward in a way that makes the superfood framing look even sillier. A major review published this February in the journal Antioxidants — Singh and colleagues — reframes these phytochemicals as what they call REDOX signaling modulators. The idea is that compounds like polyphenols and flavonoids don't primarily work by directly mopping up free radicals. What they actually do is activate the body's own Nrf2 antioxidant defense pathway. Nrf2 is a transcription factor — it's basically a master switch that turns on the body's internal antioxidant and detoxification genes.
So the phytochemicals are not the cleanup crew. They're the guy who calls the cleanup crew.
They're a mild stress signal that tells your cells to ramp up their own defenses. It's the concept of hormesis — a small dose of something that's technically a stressor triggers a protective response that's larger than the stress itself. Exercise works the same way. You damage your muscles slightly, and they rebuild stronger.
Which means the whole "this food has the highest antioxidant capacity" competition — the ORAC scores, the "ten times more antioxidants than blueberries" claims — is measuring the wrong thing. You're not trying to maximize the number of antioxidant molecules you ingest. You're trying to trigger a signaling pathway.
And the body's total antioxidant capacity, as Halliwell put it, seems unresponsive to high doses of dietary antioxidants anyway. The system is regulated. You can't brute-force it with acai powder.
So let's talk about spirulina. Daniel mentioned it specifically, and it's the poster child for this whole phenomenon.
Spirulina is fascinating because it's not nothing — it's a real food with real nutritional content. It's about sixty percent protein, it contains beta-carotene, zeaxanthin, lutein, polyphenols. NASA has used it as a dietary supplement for astronauts. There are actual human clinical trials showing some benefit for allergic rhinitis and blood glucose reduction.
But.
But Joe Schwarcz at McGill's Office for Science and Society did a dissection of a single Healthline article about blue spirulina last October and counted twenty-one uses of the word "may" and fifteen uses of "suggest," "possible," or "potential." Those are weasel words. They create the impression of proven benefit without evidence. And the effects that have been demonstrated — they've mostly been in cell cultures and animals. Schwarcz's conclusion was that for us earthlings, kale, spinach, or quinoa have a similar nutritional profile at a fraction of the cost.
Twenty-one "mays" in one article. That's not journalism. That's a wish list with a byline.
And wheatgrass is even worse. The core claim that launched a thousand juice bars is that wheatgrass floods your tissues with oxygen because chlorophyll is structurally similar to hemoglobin. New Scientist called this "a whole shot of nonsense." Chlorophyll is found in similar concentrations in basically every green vegetable. There's no evidence it functions like hemoglobin in the body, and even if it did, chlorophyll gets broken down in the gut before it ever reaches your bloodstream. The claim is structurally impossible.
The chlorophyll-hemoglobin thing. I remember this from the nineties. It had the perfect shape for a health myth — a superficially plausible chemical analogy that sounds like it explains something profound.
The trend was promoted in the nineteen forties by a woman named Ann Wigmore, who was apparently inspired by the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar eating grass. And it just... stuck. A Channel Four investigation a few years back found no evidence that wheatgrass juice improves blood oxygen content. But you can still buy a shot of it for eight dollars at any airport.
King Nebuchadnezzar. So the entire wheatgrass industry traces back to a pre-scientific interpretation of an Old Testament story about a king who went mad and lived like an animal for seven years.
That's not even the subtext. That's just the text. He ate grass because he'd lost his mind, and someone read that and thought, "There's a wellness protocol in here."
The thing that gets me about the superfood framing — and I think this is what Daniel's driving at — is that it's not just harmless marketing fluff. It actively works against good dietary advice. The Mayo Clinic's dietitian made this point really well. If kale is a superfood and you hate kale, you might force yourself to eat it for two weeks and then give up and go back to eating badly. Whereas if someone just told you "eat a variety of vegetables you actually like," you'd be fine.
The pattern is what matters. That's the consensus from every major institutional voice — Mayo Clinic, Harvard Nutrition Source, the Cochrane Collaboration. It's not about individual magic foods. It's about dietary patterns over time. But "eat a varied whole-foods diet" is a terrible marketing slogan. It doesn't sell powder in a pouch.
It doesn't look good on a smoothie bowl either. No one's posting a picture of "consistent dietary pattern over several decades" on Instagram.
And the superfood concept narrows the diet artificially. It creates a two-tier system where some foods are special and others are just... food. But the phytochemical diversity argument points in exactly the opposite direction. If there are over a hundred thousand bioactive compounds in plants, and they work through complex signaling pathways we barely understand, the smart strategy is to eat as many different kinds of plants as possible. Not to megadose on whichever one has the best PR this year.
Diversity beats intensity. That's true in finance, in ecosystems, and apparently in salad.
There's another angle here that almost never gets discussed. A 2022 review in the Journal of Cleaner Production looked at forty foods commonly called superfoods and tried to assess their environmental impact. They found that only fifteen of the forty had any life-cycle assessment at all. The field is, in their words, "still little explored." So you've got someone in London eating quinoa from Bolivia, chia seeds from Mexico, and goji berries from China, and nobody's calculated the carbon footprint versus eating locally grown cabbage and oats.
The superfood supply chain is basically a global logistics network optimized to move the most photogenic nutrients from wherever they grow to wherever people have disposable income and anxiety about mortality.
And the market keeps growing. North America is forty-three percent of global superfood sales. The category is projected to hit something like three hundred and eighty-five billion dollars by the mid twenty-thirties depending on which forecast you believe. This is not a fading trend. It's a structural feature of the food economy now.
So Daniel's observation that it's abated — he's not wrong about what he's seeing, he's just misidentifying what it is. The wheatgrass-shot era of superfoods, the very visible juice-bar aesthetic, that may have peaked. But the underlying behavior — paying a premium for foods perceived as exceptionally healthy — has just moved into different products and different marketing.
The term has become ambient. You don't notice it because it's everywhere. Superfood powders, superfood blends, superfood smoothie boosters. The search volume for "organic superfood" went up ninety-two percent in the year ending May 2025. That's not a category in decline.
The EU ban on the word is almost twenty years old now. Two thousand seven. And it didn't kill the concept — it just pushed it off the packaging and into the editorial content. Now the blog tells you it's a superfood and the package just has a picture of an Incan warrior on it and the word "ancient."
And the FDA never followed suit, so in the US it's still the wild west. You can call anything a superfood. You can call a potato chip a superfood if you dust it with enough spirulina powder.
Someone's definitely done that.
Oh, almost certainly. The thing I keep thinking about is the gap between what the science actually says now and what the public believes. That New Scientist survey from 2016 — sixty-one percent of UK adults admitted buying a food because they considered it a superfood. Thirty percent agreed that superfoods are scientifically proven to have health benefits. Fourteen percent were willing to pay more for products labeled that way.
Thirty percent think it's scientifically proven. That's the number that sits with me. Because the science doesn't just say "unproven." On the supplement side, the science says "may increase your risk of death." That's not a gap. That's a chasm with a smoothie bar at the bottom.
And the supplement finding is worth sitting with for a second, because it's counterintuitive. Beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E — these are not exotic compounds. They're essential nutrients. And in isolated high-dose form, in well-nourished populations, the best evidence says they do net harm. The Cochrane review wasn't ambiguous about this. The confidence interval on that mortality increase was one point oh one to one point oh seven. It doesn't cross one. It's a real signal.
Which brings us back to food versus extracts. The whole superfood concept blurs this line constantly. A food contains some compound that shows an interesting effect in a petri dish, and suddenly the extract of that compound is being sold as a supplement, and the food itself is being marketed as a superfood, and none of these things are the same thing.
The food matrix matters. Nutrients don't work the same way in isolation as they do inside a whole food. Fiber, water content, the interaction between different compounds — all of that changes how your body processes what you eat. A blueberry and a blueberry extract are not interchangeable.
Daniel's point about the artificial boundary being anti-scientific — I think this is where it lands hardest. You're taking a continuous spectrum of plant compounds across thousands of edible species, and you're drawing a bright line around a hundred and thirty-six of them based on... what? Which ones have the best-funded trade associations? Which ones photograph well? Which ones have a creation myth involving an ancient civilization?
The ancient civilization thing is a tell, by the way. If the marketing mentions Incas or Aztecs or "Himalayan villagers," you're being sold a story, not a food.
Quinoa's fine. It's a perfectly good grain. But it's not magical because the Incas ate it. The Incas also practiced trepanation. We don't do that anymore.
I want to circle back to the phytochemical signaling thing because it's important and it's the part of this that most coverage misses. The 2026 review — Singh and colleagues — their core argument is that these plant compounds are not primarily direct antioxidants in the body. They're what they call "neurohormetic phytochemicals." The idea is that they're mild stressors that activate adaptive responses. They trigger the Nrf2 pathway, which then upregulates a whole suite of protective genes — genes that produce the body's own antioxidant enzymes, detoxification proteins, things like glutathione and superoxide dismutase.
So the plant compound is the key that turns on the body's own factory. You're not importing antioxidants. You're telling your cells to make more of their own.
And that factory is vastly more sophisticated than anything you can swallow. The endogenous antioxidant system is precisely regulated, compartmentalized within cells, and produces enzymes that are orders of magnitude more effective than dietary antioxidants at actually neutralizing free radicals where they're generated.
Which explains why dumping exogenous antioxidants on top doesn't help and might hurt. You're not supplementing the system. You're potentially interfering with a signaling pathway that's more subtle than you understand.
Halliwell actually suggested that supplying weak pro-oxidants might be a more useful approach than supplying antioxidants — because the mild oxidative stress is what triggers the protective response. It's the same logic as exercise. You don't get stronger by taking a pill that mimics muscle contraction. You get stronger by stressing your muscles and letting them adapt.
The entire superfood industry is built on exactly the opposite model. It's built on the idea that you can extract the benefit and skip the process. The powder, the shot, the concentrate — it's all an attempt to get the outcome without the input.
The process isn't an inconvenience. It's the mechanism.
So where does this leave someone who just wants to eat well? Daniel's basically asking: if superfoods are a marketing fiction, and antioxidant supplements might kill you slightly faster, what's the actual advice?
The advice is spectacularly boring and it hasn't changed in decades. Eat a variety of vegetables and fruits. Mostly whole foods. Don't overthink individual ingredients. The pattern matters more than any single food. Halliwell himself — the guy who named the antioxidant paradox — his advice was: eat well, including plenty of fruits, grains, and vegetables, avoid obesity, don't smoke, exercise regularly, and your oxidative damage should be minimized.
"Eat well, don't smoke, exercise." That's the antioxidant paradox resolved into a sentence, and it will never sell a single bag of goji berries.
Catherine Collins, a dietician at St George's Hospital in London, made this point about goji berries specifically. She said other foods that will have exactly the same effects are far cheaper. You don't need goji berries. You need any berries. Or any dark-colored fruit. Or honestly just a carrot.
A carrot. The world's least exciting superfood. Zero Instagram potential. Available in every grocery store for pennies. Contains beta-carotene, fiber, and absolutely no creation myth involving Himalayan villagers.
Carrots were actually one of the original superfoods in World War Two — the British government promoted them for night vision to hide the existence of radar from the Germans. So they do have a creation myth, it's just a better one.
Government propaganda about root vegetables. I prefer that to "ancient Incan wisdom."
Hilbert: The NutriBullet.
...
...
Hilbert: The nine hundred series. The Pro nine hundred, specifically. I sold them for eighteen months. This would have been... eighty-five, eighty-six. I was between jobs and my brother-in-law had a distributorship for small kitchen appliances in Paramus. The NutriBullet hadn't come out yet — this was its predecessor, the Vita-Mix three thousand six hundred. Same idea. You put the vegetables in, you hit the button, it turns them into liquid. The pitch was that the machine "broke the cell walls" and released nutrients you couldn't get from chewing.
The cell wall thing is actually partially true for some plant —
Hilbert: We sold nine thousand of them in fourteen months. I was on commission. I made more money that year than I did in the three years before it combined. And the reason wasn't the cell walls. The reason was the demonstration. You put a whole carrot in the machine, you hit the button, it disappears into orange water in four seconds. People would watch that and something would happen in their brain. They weren't buying a blender. They were buying the feeling of being the kind of person who drinks a liquefied carrot.
The demonstration is the product.
Hilbert: The demonstration is the product. The machine cost three hundred and forty dollars. In nineteen eighty-five. That's about a thousand in today's money. And the thing is, it worked fine. It blended things. But the superfood part — the "nutrient extraction," the "cell wall rupture," the special pitcher that was supposed to vortex the ingredients in a way that preserved enzymes — none of that was real. It was a blender. A very expensive blender with a good demonstration.
The vortex pitcher was a real patent, actually. It did create a different flow pattern than a standard blender jar. Whether that meaningfully changed nutrient availability is a separate question.
Hilbert: It didn't. We tested it. My brother-in-law had a lab run comparisons — he wanted to have numbers for the sales reps. The standard blender and the Vita-Mix produced nutritionally identical output. He buried the report and told us to keep doing the carrot demo. The carrot demo never lost.
So the entire direct-sales superfood appliance industry was built on a demo that worked because carrots are orange and disappear quickly.
Hilbert: Because people want to believe. That's the part nobody talks about. The customers weren't stupid. They knew it was a blender. But they wanted the story. They wanted to be told that this blender was different, that this blender would make them healthy in a way the other blender wouldn't. We weren't selling machines. We were selling the permission to believe that this time the shortcut would work.
The shortcut. That's the through-line, isn't it? Spirulina powder, wheatgrass shots, the Vita-Mix, the antioxidant supplements. Every one of them is a promise that you can get the benefit without the boring process.
Hilbert: I still have the demo carrot. It's in a box somewhere. It's plastic. We used a real carrot for the first show of the day and a plastic one for the rest. The plastic one blended faster. Nobody ever noticed.
You kept the plastic carrot.
Hilbert: It was a good carrot.
The entire superfood industry in one anecdote. A plastic carrot, a good demo, and a buried lab report.
The thing that strikes me about Hilbert's story is the year. Nineteen eighty-five. The superfood concept as marketing predates the term itself by at least a decade. The Vita-Mix pitch — "break the cell walls, release the nutrients" — that's the same logic as cold-pressed juice and activated almonds and every extraction-based health claim since. The technology changes, the story doesn't.
The story is always: we found a way to get the good part out and leave the boring part behind. And the science keeps saying the boring part is the part that does the work.
The fiber, the chewing, the digestion time, the satiety, the microbiome interactions — all of that is the mechanism. You can't extract your way around it. The process is the point.
Daniel's question about superfoods being anti-scientific — it's worse than that. It's not just that the category is arbitrary. It's that the entire framing pushes people toward extraction and concentration and away from the thing that actually works, which is eating a variety of whole plants in their intact form.
Paying a premium for the privilege. You're spending more to get less, nutritionally speaking, while the global market races toward four hundred billion dollars.
The one thing I'd add — and this is where I think the science is encouraging — is that the phytochemical diversity argument means you don't need to optimize. You don't need the perfect superfood. You need variety over time. Different colors, different plant families, different seasons. The system handles the rest.
The Nrf2 pathway doesn't care whether the polyphenol came from a blueberry or a red cabbage. It just responds. Diversity is the strategy. Everything else is marketing.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who once sold nine thousand blenders with a plastic carrot and has the object to prove it.
If you want to send us your questions about nutrition, marketing, or anything else Daniel might find dubious, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
