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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
"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.
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].
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."
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".
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.
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.
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.'"
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!
In California, the problem is quite serous. There is a food cartel that runs on undocumented labor. The California food industry maintains artificially high prices because the people in it are racists. These sick people will do anything to manipulate their victims, including using words like "superfood" to trick them into a false sense of security.
"Sales of coconut water have skyrocketed in the past two years, and anecdotally, several fitness buffs interviewed by Marketplace said they believe it hydrates better than tap water."
That's... that's a tall bar. "Provides more electrolytes" than water, sure. "More energizing than water", sure. But hydrates better than water? Though a charitable reading of the fitness buff's claim could be that it's "better for someone working out than water", which, again, is at least possible as there are more dimensions than just "hydration" there.
Doesn't matter. Even if I only absorbed 90% of the water I drank, I could just drink 1.111 L of water to get 1 L of "hydration", and it would still be cheaper than drinking 1 L of Brawndo, the Thirst Annihilator.
On a money cost basis, in any place on Earth that has municipal drinking water on tap, drinking that water is the cheapest way to hydrate your body. Whether or not "best" includes the money cost is a matter of opinion, but most people at least include it as a factor.
The same goes for a lot of "superfoods". On a cost basis, whatever you get from 100g of the "superfood" can probably be obtained by eating 200g of something else, sold at a much lower price. Or it's only of interest to vegans, because the "something else" is an animal product. People on western diets just aren't limited by nutrition content. If you eat your normal calorie quota--even a reduced quota from a weight-loss diet--you can always get adequate nutrition from just the normal, healthy, non-"super" foods. There's nothing stopping you from eating a bucketful of broccoli with a bit of salmon, and skipping the wheatgrass-kale-chia-pomegranate super-smoothies forever.
I'd like to see some evidence of that. No sarcasm, I'd be interested if someone could provide some. But the article kindly provided evidence that coconut water does not hydrate better, and I found it particularly interesting that it hydrated exactly as well, which to me strongly suggests that the primary driver in how hydrating something is, unsurprisingly, the water in it. I find the science part of my mind is not all that discomfited by taking coconut water as a first-order approximation of energy drinks in general. (It of course is yelling "test it! test it!", but honestly, that's just background noise to this query. It's always yammering on about that with no thought as to how expensive the testing is. That's its job, of course.)
Money quote : “study in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that consuming an isotonic sports drink increased treadmill running time to exhaustion by 27% in recreational runners.”
It doesn’t say what journal though. The key also seems to be isotonic drinks according to that article.
They seem to be making strangely isolated measurements that have little to do with the claimed benefits of the alleged superfoods.
For starters I think most people agree there is no need to replace electrolytes during endurance activities that do not exceed 1 hour, oddly the length of time in this study. I’m not sure anyone claims coconut water hydrates better than water, but certainly it’s going to be more beneficial for replacing lost electrolytes. Personally, I’d like to see a study regarding coconut milk vs water and the hydration effects on the intestines themselves, my hypothesis would be intestines hydrated with coconut milk more readily absorb vitamins and nutrients from other foods than intestines hydrated with just water, either way it would be an interesting experiment.
As to chia seeds being compared to salmon, that alone should probably confirm their status as a food rich in omega 3 fatty acids, as salmon is one of the best sources of omega 3 fatty acids. But what’s the use case? As a runner I am more inclined to drink water or coconut milk with a teaspoon of soaked chia seeds rather than run with a belly full of salmon, but for dinner I’d rather have a plate of salmon than a teaspoon of chia seed. And omega 3s are not the sole benefit of chia seeds, As natures form of time release capsules they will provide some degree of continued hydration during long runs from the liquid they were soaked in that salmon will not. It seems they could have measured the hydrating effects of the chia seed vs the salmon, but instead they only seem to focus on the percent of omega 3 obsorption of chia vs salmon, but as I said these were oddly isolated measurements.
Once you start getting into this type of thinking it's really easy to go down a rabbit hole.
I'd love to see the same research, but if you start digging into this subject you will be disappointed in the answers you get.
After researching this stuff as a hobby for some time, I've come to the conclusion that this stuff is not well understood and there is still a lot left to explore.
As technical people, we sometimes look for something along the lines of hey - this is the chemical composition of something, balance some equations and figure out the affect it has on our body chemistry. This is just an exmaple, of course it's simplified and not quite accurate.
Unfortunately it's not that simple and doing this kind of research requires a ton of data and test subjects that just aren't practical in day to day research.
Agreed. When I discovered the world of healthy living, I started reading and applying a lot of nutrition advice to my life. It was natural that I would come across research defending both sides of the coin for certain foods (eggs, for example), but I felt I generally became healthier and more aware of what I put into my body. However, over time I felt I read enough to come to the conclusion that we don't really know much at all and so I don't really read about nutrition research anymore. I tend to stick to simple principles now like eat more vegetables and as little sugar as possible. Beyond that, it seems too nebulous.
Personally I think the data, if not the studies are readily available, it’s just impossible to have a conversation about diet and nutrition. For example, look at this thread and you would think all you need to do is have 1 person run a treadmill for 1 hour drinking tap water and day 2 repeat the run with coconut water and boom...a legitimate study that “superfoods” are a myth.
Continue in this thread and you will note comments, for no reason whatsoever, emphatically stating antioxidants don’t exist. But just to preemptively dissuade a dialogue a suggestion people who believe antioxidants exist also believe their consumption will prevent all cancer...somehow no middle ground exists. Such is my experience discussing diet.
I find it’s not just with healthy foods and diets, but one can’t even discuss the correlation of diet and obesity, chronic inflammation, cardio vascular disease, heart disease or diabetes...at least without someone linking to a McDonald’s, Twinkie or ice cream diet where the subject lost weight. In fact I recently had a professor argue with me here on HN that the development of fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes in children (formerly adult onset diabetes) was unrelated to sugar but rather some mystery variable which hadn’t been discovered because children hadn’t been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes prior to the 1980’s and he ate a ton of sugar growing up in the 70’s.
History and entire populace’s of people can serve as the data. Look at the historical diet in Okinawa where they once had the longest life expectancy (but not since the introduction of western diet post WW2) and you will find nutrient/vitamin dense but low calorie foods, foods that are anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant rich, promote healthy liver and kidney function (detoxification). The concepts are not dissimilar to the Mediterranean diet, which also promotes health and longevity, while the foods themselves are dissimilar. It should come as no surprise that these are the same conclusions you and darktree seem to come to with your own experience, only you are focusing more on the macro side of things. I think what you are finding is you are healthy when you maximizie vitamin/nutrient to calorie intake, remove/minimize refined sugar and carbs (both inflammatory and insulin production triggers). Within that framework you can have foods (diets) as diverse as historical Okinawa and the Mediterranean diet, it just so happens food labeled superfoods also tend to (but not always) fall within the same framework.
Have to agree - also adding the bit about needing a lot of test subjects that isn't always feasible if you're doing more targeted analysis - otherwise looking at entire populations over time does offer value.
For me personally, nutrition's been categorized along with politics and religion as topics off limits for discussion in social settings unless I know the people I'm chatting with already.
I think there are a lot more interesting superfoods.
Stinging nettles are amazing: 30% protein by dry weight, incredibly dense with vitamins and minerals, stingers contain human-compatible neurotransmitters. Also, the baby plants are most nutritious and can't sting you yet!
What is the benefit of containing neurotransmitters? I hit up Wikipedia and see they carry signals. I'm not seeing how that is a benefit, however. They appear to carry any signal, not some special signals. Unless one has too few (I'm not sure what might even cause that) then I'm not seeing why that's beneficial.
I don't think they can cross the blood brain barrier, but I think I've read that some can get partially metabolized into a precursor, travel across the BBB, and then re-assembled within the brain.
Probably not particularly necessary for healthy individuals, but could reduce the amount of work needed to synthesize your own transmitters (few steps rather than 'from scratch'). Perhaps some individuals with neurotransmitter deficits could see benefit.
As I'm sure you can tell though, I'm not a trained neuroscientist.
Hmm... If I'm understanding correctly, they might possible be bound to opiate molecules and increase efficacy in hitting the receptors?
That makes some sense. By itself, I can't think of how it would benefit a healthy person. I'm not even sure what kinds of unhealthy people that might help.
So, to me it looked like, 'Hey, here are some fancy words! Don't look too deep, because they are mostly meaningless.' No offense intended, that's just what it looked like to a curious layman.
I have a commercial wild blueberry operation so I hear some really, really strange claims. Things like this peg my skepticism meter. No, my blueberries won't turn you into Superman or Einstein. They don't cure cancer, prevent HIV, or give you psychic powers.
I don't think nettles have opiate-like molecules. (Would probably be counter productive - less pain, poorer defense mechanism)
Nettles have serotonin, histamine, and acetylcholine. Serotonin could benefit certain mood disorders, and acetylcholine supplementation can reduce certain kinds of headaches.
As with all natural foods/medicines, I think you'd typically see only minor benefits over long-term supplementation. Much less powerful than modern medicine, but perhaps fewer side effects when taken properly.
You're right to be skeptical though, lots of snake-oil salesmen in the natural food space making dubious claims. Blueberries are probably much healthier for you than eating Cheetos, but probably not that different from other berries. I appreciate scientists studying which species have the most nutrition, but variance in freshness and growing conditions are probably the biggest factors in nutritional density. ex. fresh raspberry are probably better than old poorly grown blueberries.
I meant they could be chemically bound with opiate molecules in a separate process. Not that they contained them by default and in nature. Sorry for the confusion.
52 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadSome of us just wanted to drink that because it tastes good...
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?
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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146683/
"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]"
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
"'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!
That's... that's a tall bar. "Provides more electrolytes" than water, sure. "More energizing than water", sure. But hydrates better than water? Though a charitable reading of the fitness buff's claim could be that it's "better for someone working out than water", which, again, is at least possible as there are more dimensions than just "hydration" there.
On a money cost basis, in any place on Earth that has municipal drinking water on tap, drinking that water is the cheapest way to hydrate your body. Whether or not "best" includes the money cost is a matter of opinion, but most people at least include it as a factor.
The same goes for a lot of "superfoods". On a cost basis, whatever you get from 100g of the "superfood" can probably be obtained by eating 200g of something else, sold at a much lower price. Or it's only of interest to vegans, because the "something else" is an animal product. People on western diets just aren't limited by nutrition content. If you eat your normal calorie quota--even a reduced quota from a weight-loss diet--you can always get adequate nutrition from just the normal, healthy, non-"super" foods. There's nothing stopping you from eating a bucketful of broccoli with a bit of salmon, and skipping the wheatgrass-kale-chia-pomegranate super-smoothies forever.
Money quote : “study in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that consuming an isotonic sports drink increased treadmill running time to exhaustion by 27% in recreational runners.”
It doesn’t say what journal though. The key also seems to be isotonic drinks according to that article.
For starters I think most people agree there is no need to replace electrolytes during endurance activities that do not exceed 1 hour, oddly the length of time in this study. I’m not sure anyone claims coconut water hydrates better than water, but certainly it’s going to be more beneficial for replacing lost electrolytes. Personally, I’d like to see a study regarding coconut milk vs water and the hydration effects on the intestines themselves, my hypothesis would be intestines hydrated with coconut milk more readily absorb vitamins and nutrients from other foods than intestines hydrated with just water, either way it would be an interesting experiment.
As to chia seeds being compared to salmon, that alone should probably confirm their status as a food rich in omega 3 fatty acids, as salmon is one of the best sources of omega 3 fatty acids. But what’s the use case? As a runner I am more inclined to drink water or coconut milk with a teaspoon of soaked chia seeds rather than run with a belly full of salmon, but for dinner I’d rather have a plate of salmon than a teaspoon of chia seed. And omega 3s are not the sole benefit of chia seeds, As natures form of time release capsules they will provide some degree of continued hydration during long runs from the liquid they were soaked in that salmon will not. It seems they could have measured the hydrating effects of the chia seed vs the salmon, but instead they only seem to focus on the percent of omega 3 obsorption of chia vs salmon, but as I said these were oddly isolated measurements.
I'd love to see the same research, but if you start digging into this subject you will be disappointed in the answers you get.
After researching this stuff as a hobby for some time, I've come to the conclusion that this stuff is not well understood and there is still a lot left to explore.
As technical people, we sometimes look for something along the lines of hey - this is the chemical composition of something, balance some equations and figure out the affect it has on our body chemistry. This is just an exmaple, of course it's simplified and not quite accurate.
Unfortunately it's not that simple and doing this kind of research requires a ton of data and test subjects that just aren't practical in day to day research.
Seems like a lot of peopl end up settling into something like this.
Continue in this thread and you will note comments, for no reason whatsoever, emphatically stating antioxidants don’t exist. But just to preemptively dissuade a dialogue a suggestion people who believe antioxidants exist also believe their consumption will prevent all cancer...somehow no middle ground exists. Such is my experience discussing diet.
I find it’s not just with healthy foods and diets, but one can’t even discuss the correlation of diet and obesity, chronic inflammation, cardio vascular disease, heart disease or diabetes...at least without someone linking to a McDonald’s, Twinkie or ice cream diet where the subject lost weight. In fact I recently had a professor argue with me here on HN that the development of fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes in children (formerly adult onset diabetes) was unrelated to sugar but rather some mystery variable which hadn’t been discovered because children hadn’t been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes prior to the 1980’s and he ate a ton of sugar growing up in the 70’s.
History and entire populace’s of people can serve as the data. Look at the historical diet in Okinawa where they once had the longest life expectancy (but not since the introduction of western diet post WW2) and you will find nutrient/vitamin dense but low calorie foods, foods that are anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant rich, promote healthy liver and kidney function (detoxification). The concepts are not dissimilar to the Mediterranean diet, which also promotes health and longevity, while the foods themselves are dissimilar. It should come as no surprise that these are the same conclusions you and darktree seem to come to with your own experience, only you are focusing more on the macro side of things. I think what you are finding is you are healthy when you maximizie vitamin/nutrient to calorie intake, remove/minimize refined sugar and carbs (both inflammatory and insulin production triggers). Within that framework you can have foods (diets) as diverse as historical Okinawa and the Mediterranean diet, it just so happens food labeled superfoods also tend to (but not always) fall within the same framework.
For me personally, nutrition's been categorized along with politics and religion as topics off limits for discussion in social settings unless I know the people I'm chatting with already.
Stinging nettles are amazing: 30% protein by dry weight, incredibly dense with vitamins and minerals, stingers contain human-compatible neurotransmitters. Also, the baby plants are most nutritious and can't sting you yet!
Probably not particularly necessary for healthy individuals, but could reduce the amount of work needed to synthesize your own transmitters (few steps rather than 'from scratch'). Perhaps some individuals with neurotransmitter deficits could see benefit.
As I'm sure you can tell though, I'm not a trained neuroscientist.
That makes some sense. By itself, I can't think of how it would benefit a healthy person. I'm not even sure what kinds of unhealthy people that might help.
So, to me it looked like, 'Hey, here are some fancy words! Don't look too deep, because they are mostly meaningless.' No offense intended, that's just what it looked like to a curious layman.
I have a commercial wild blueberry operation so I hear some really, really strange claims. Things like this peg my skepticism meter. No, my blueberries won't turn you into Superman or Einstein. They don't cure cancer, prevent HIV, or give you psychic powers.
Nettles have serotonin, histamine, and acetylcholine. Serotonin could benefit certain mood disorders, and acetylcholine supplementation can reduce certain kinds of headaches.
As with all natural foods/medicines, I think you'd typically see only minor benefits over long-term supplementation. Much less powerful than modern medicine, but perhaps fewer side effects when taken properly.
You're right to be skeptical though, lots of snake-oil salesmen in the natural food space making dubious claims. Blueberries are probably much healthier for you than eating Cheetos, but probably not that different from other berries. I appreciate scientists studying which species have the most nutrition, but variance in freshness and growing conditions are probably the biggest factors in nutritional density. ex. fresh raspberry are probably better than old poorly grown blueberries.
Blueberries contain antioxidants! LOL