Prof Regan's Supermarket Secrets (25 of 27)

Prof Regan's Supermarket Secrets

Chemical analysis of the superfoods can show they have higher levels of some nutrients but it's their impact on US that is difficult to measure.
Just because something is a superfood in a test tube does not translate, as these results show, into a superfood in us.
Because a food may have eight times the antioxidant potential of another doesn't give us eight times the benefit.
And I think this natural variation in blood results from the start to the finish some going up, some down, and all different between groups of twins, just shows that we are what we eat but our bodies dictate exactly how we deal with things.
We can use foods as a blunt instrument - "Eat this, never get cancer" - this is not going to work.

What our trial showed conclusively is that proving scientifically whether foods deserve the word super or not is extremely difficult.
But that doesn't stop food manufacturers using it.
The Innocent Drinks company claim their superfood smoothies contain antioxidants.
It 's a well known scientific buzzword but does it mean anything?
The real problem the consumer has is they're being given these weasel words like antioxidants.
I, as a nutritionist who has been studying the area, don't understand what it means, so the consumer has even less chance.
Richard Reed's company turns over ?00 million a year but today Prof Regan has brought some challenging research with her.
This is a European report, saying here, "Human intervention studies have shown no consistent benefit of increased intake "of dietary antioxidants in the prevention of human diseases."
Where are the really large studies that actually sort of link antioxidant intake with improvement in heart disease?