Are Quinoa, Chia Seeds, and Other “Superfoods” a Scam?

Sure, trendy ingredients work like magic—for industry’s bottom line.

Some gorgeous red quinoa.Wikimedia

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

 

They’re widely vilified—including by me—but food industry marketers really do have a tough job. People can only eat so much, and in industrialized countries where food is plentiful, they don’t tend to consume more of it as their incomes grow. Unlike sales of, say, personal computers in the 1990s or tablets in the 2010s, overall US food spending tends to be pretty flat—it rises roughly with the growth of population.

One way the industry responds to this stagnation is to roll out “new and improved” products—an endless grope for bigger pieces of a slow-growing pie. Junk food manufacturers are masters of this game: Smokin’ Bacon Ranch Miracle Whip Dipping Sauce, anyone? But the natural-food industry does it, too—with superfoods such as açaí berries, goji berries, quinoa, and chia seeds. These pricey, often exotic ingredients cycle quickly in and out of the foodie spotlight. Açaí berries were barely known outside of Brazil a decade ago, but in 2012 açaí-laced products grossed nearly $200 million in the United States. And while açaí sales have dropped recently as their novelty has worn thin, coconut oil—touted as a wonder fat—is picking up the slack with $62 million in 2012, double the previous year’s level.

Some of the super claims are true: Açaí berries, native to the Amazon rainforest, and goji berries, produced mostly in northern China, are indeed loaded with phytochemicals, plant compounds that seem to protect us from heart disease, brain deterioration, and cancer. And quinoa, the seed of a spinachlike plant grown in the Andes, really does offer a complete, high-quality vegetarian protein. Other boasts are, well, less true: Açaí and goji berries are not really miracle cures for everything from obesity to sexual dysfunction. Indeed, in 2006, the Food and Drug Administration reprimanded two different goji product manufacturers for making unsubstantiated health claims in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

Nor do all superfoods come from the pristine places that their packaging would suggest. One prominent US goji supplier, Navitas, calls its berries a “Himalayan superfruit,” but the company’s website reveals they’re a product of China, grown in the “lush, fertile valleys of the Ningxia Province.” That’s nowhere near Tibet—and, it turns out, most of the world’s goji berries hail from industrial fields in this region.

Worse than superfoods’ origin myths, though, are their effects on the people in their native regions. In 2009, at the height of the açaí berry hype, Bloomberg News reported that the fruit’s wholesale price had jumped 60-fold since the early 2000s, pricing the Amazonian villagers who rely on it out of the market. In the Andes, where quinoa has been cultivated since the time of the Incas, price spikes have turned a one-time staple into a luxury, and quinoa monocrops are crowding out the more sustainable traditional methods.

If that doesn’t faze you, perhaps this will: Quinoa may deliver a complete protein—all of the amino acids you require—in a compact package, but rice and beans together actually do better. And like goji berries, blueberries and strawberries are packed with phytochemicals. The only problem is that lacking an exotic back story, food marketers can’t wring as exorbitant a markup from these staples: The domestic blueberry, for example, is periodically (and justifiably) marketed as a superfood, and in 2012, products featuring blueberries as a primary ingredient saw their sales nearly quadruple. But they only raked in $3.5 million—less than 2 percent of açaí-based product sales.

Yes, the food industry’s hawkers have a tough job—and you can make it even tougher. The real superfoods are lurking exactly where marketers don’t want you to look: in produce sections, bulk food aisles, and backyard gardens. Not quite as exotic as the Himalayas. But then again, neither are those industrial plots in China where goji berries actually come from.

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate