Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Whenever someone talks about "superfoods" I immediately think they are full of shit. It's just an attempt to make something simple (normal food) into something expensive to make money from. Same happened to exercise. The basics of exercise haven't changed in a long time but you still have people repackaging it to make money.

It's an extra bummer because they price things higher when there's a market of customers saying "If I keep chugging this pomegranate juice I'll never get cancer, it's got antioxidants!"

Some of us just wanted to drink that because it tastes good...

"antioxidants" is also on my bullshit list

What? Sure, don't buy the marketing hype but antioxidants ingested via food (as oppposed to pills) is supposed to be beneficial to you.

When you say it's "on your bullshit list" do you mean you don't believe in things like free radicals? Or do you mean that you don't think there's antioxidants in abundant supply in said product?

I believe that food can't be reduced to one ingredient. If something contains antioxidants but also a ton of sugar or other stuff you have take that into account too and see if the net effect is positive or negative. You can't just say food with antioxidants is good for you. It's like eating organic chocolate. It's maybe a little better than regular but it's still chocolate with a ton of sugar so net it's not good for you.

There are sound theoretical reasons to think that antioxidant ingestion ought to be good for you and the antioxidants in your body are certainly important. But all the research I've seen on the matter is that ingesting extra antioxidants has the opposite of the effect you'd expect. I'd guess this is some homeostasis related interaction but I don't think anybody actually knows why.

Even if antioxidants are good for you, I can't see a cup of juice being the optimal way to get them. 160 calories / 8 oz serving.

As far as antioxidants themselves are concerned, if you do go the pills route, be sure it's not too much. High levels are linked to increased cancer risk, which is the opposite of what people are going for. How much is too much? I dunno, but I figure the amount I get from drinking tea isn't going to kill me.

Actually there are studies demonstrating that pomegranate improves blood circulation - and for me that's the main reason to use it. Antioxidants etc. is just bullshit.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146683/

Superfoods is a marketing term. I love saying you know what is a superfood? Beans and mushrooms and they say no thank you and walk away with their seaweed and chia smoothie.

"'The term "superfoods" is at best meaningless and at worst harmful,' said Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London. 'There are so many wrong ideas about superfoods that I don't know where best to begin to dismantle the whole concept.'"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/13/health.healthandw...

PS My WIFE says superfood at least 3 times a week and I have a ton of Chia and Quinoa in my kitchen I like the taste of them and my wife feels healthy. I bought them on Amazon in bulk and were super cheap.

Now if I could only get her to stop juicing!!!!!!! UGH that is the worst! Ginger and Prickly Pear with God knows what else!

Most of these happenings, in my opinion, just take advantage of consumer ignorance. Getting your advice about anything in life from product advertising is what advertisers want.

Coconut water is repackaged waste byproduct that someone figured out how to make money off of. It's classic marketing.

Coconut water was always very popular as soft drink in producing countries. Not waste.

In Brazil, it’s a traditional remedy if you have a bad stomach. It’s also sold at a lot of tourist destinations fresh from the coconut as it’s very refreshing.

Common, but in somewhat limited quantities.

"Anecdotal sources describe coconut water is used in India for the senicide of elderly people, a procedure known as thalaikoothal.[13] In this custom, the elderly person is made to drink an excessive amount of coconut water, eventually resulting in fever and death, the exact causes of which have not been determined.[13]"

In Brazil is extremely common, at least in the south: during the summer you can buy cold green coconuts pretty much everywhere, but specially in the coast; I used to drink it almost daily.

I'm not sure what your point is here.

It's well-known that green coconut vendors are very common in India (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tender_coconut_vendo...). They have a cart of coconuts, chop the top off of one as you watch, and hand it to you to drink. As a tourist, it seemed to me to be safer than drinking water.

So, to the original point above, coconut water is not waste, and is quite refreshing, and fills a useful niche if you're worried about stomach bugs.

I agree it's a common drink, but much like orange juice it's not good in large quantities. So, the reason it ended up as a waste product was supply vastly outstripped demand.

The sad thing is that all this marketing prevents people from making real improvements. I know people who wanted to switch to better nutrition but then they saw the cost of "superfoods" and organics and gave up. I told them to just eat regular vegetables but it has to be either superfood or nothing. Same with exercise. Either you have to do Crossfit to the point of exhaustion or just stay on your sofa.

> Either you have to do Crossfit to the point of exhaustion or just stay on your sofa

This comes up with some regularity in my circle of friends. They've been sold the idea that the value of exercise is only measured in terms of calories burned per minute of activity. Not only is this negating 90% of the benefits for exercise, it's also a useless measure because it's impossible to out-train a bad diet and excess calories.

I agree with most of your points but you can definately out train excess calories, probably not if you have other commitments like a family or a job, but if you hike all day everyday or are on an extended bike tour you are probably actually going to have trouble getting enough calories and can basically eat as much as you can without consuming too much.

Saw a documentary about Tour De France riders. They had to force huge plates of spaghetti into themselves every night to the point of throwing up and still lost a ton of weight during the race. It's hard to stay overweight if you are active the whole day.

All this is true, for elite athletes performing at the limit of human ability, you can out-train a bad diet.

The thing is, this only applies during high-level competitions, and in no way counts for the rest of the time. Nobody can compete at that level endlessly, obvious. More importantly, it doesn't raise their basal metabolism beyond a certain point, and the basal metabolism is what counts in overall long-term caloric consumption.

For regular humans, there's simply no getting around the fact that running a mile only burns 100 kCal or so[1], and it's possible to eat more than 100kCal in seconds simply by eating a single Reese's peanut butter cup[2].

1. http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/training/many-calories...

2. https://www.hersheys.com/reeses/en_us/products/reeses-peanut...

No doubt. Unless you do the Tour De France or hike 20 miles per day you have to watch what you eat.

You should see what tourists will pay for certified organic wild Maine blueberries. The only difference between them is they come from a field that wasn't sprayed.

They pay three times the price and six times the wholesale price. They are the same berries, harvested the exact same way.

You can double the price again, if you have someone hand pick them instead of raking them. Even better, you can charge them about the same price and let them pick the berries themselves.

Getting people to value waste byproduct is pretty awesome hacking. It takes a special kind of imagination and guts to say "this trash, I can turn it into treasure."

Where there’s shit, there’s gold. I’m all for people repurposing and selling something that would otherwise go into landfill, etc.

Coconut water, when it's actually fresh (I don't know about after packing/processing), is actually pretty good for drinking, especially since it has various nutrients you don't get out of regular water. Fresh, it isn't something I'd call a "waste byproduct".

The entire superfood craze is about packaging, processing and marketing. Fresh isn't an ingredient, it's subjective.

What I'm trying to get at is that coconut water itself isn't some "waste product". Granted, it be might have been an unused material in some coconut processing pipelines (though I'd be skeptical of that, since anyone that spends time with coconuts knows there's some good stuff in there).

Fresh, for me, refers to having coconut water where the coconut was cut off the tree minutes prior to being opened up. I don't know enough about how Zico and the like are process to speak with any intelligence as to how it might affect the end-product.

EDIT: that being said, I wouldn't pay $6/liter for coconut water. That's overpriced by a long shot, IMO.

I lived on that in India while traveling. Cheap, good and easy to get.

Not to mention that you don't have to worry about it harboring any pathogens, if you're getting it straight out of a coconut. Which is an advantage in places where the water supply is otherwise dubious.

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