 Okay, so let's start with an important question. What the heck is a superfood? It's almost a superfood is in the eye of the beholder, and I think we really have to be cautious with the term superfood at all. In general, superfood should be nutrient dense and calorie sparse. In other words, you pack a lot of great stuff into not a lot of caloric weight. For instance, the more polyphenols that something has, I consider the better the superfood it is. But there are some polyphenols in foods that have a lot of calories. So for instance, extra dark chocolate has a ton of polyphenols and cacao in and of itself has got some pretty great qualities as a superfood. But when you start adding sugar to that to make chocolate that you're probably going to eat, it may have an original ingredient of superfood, but it no longer qualifies as a superfood. Same way with coffee. There are so many great studies that the polyphenols in black coffee really qualifies a coffee bean, a coffee drink, black as one of the great superfoods that you can have, but if you then put several teaspoons of sugar and lots of junk and make a frappuccino out of it and ice it, it's now a 500 calorie sugar bomb that has nothing to do with the original ingredient. Plus, believe it or not, coffee bean is the bean of a berry and coffee fruit, the powder that we throw away for the most part, actually probably has far more polyphenols that are great for you than the coffee bean you're getting. Okay, so in general, nutrient-dense calorie poor is really one of the best ways to define a superfood. Okay, so now that you know what a superfood is, in my opinion, let's talk about some superfoods that you should probably never eat. Now one of my favorites is goji berries, and any of you who have listened to me in the past know that one of the most momentous moments in my young career as a nutritionist was touting goji berries, because they've got so many cool polyphenols, and I was actually on the phone with Lauren Cordain, the Colorado State professor who truly is the father of the paleo diet, and I was telling him how great goji berries were, and he said, don't you read the literature? And I said, well, you know what I do? Of course I do. He says, no, I'm going to send you two papers to show you what in the dingdong was wrong with goji berries, and these papers in humans actually showed that people consuming goji berries actually had more inflammation. So why? Well, it turns out that goji berries are from the United States. They're from North America. They were called the wolfberry, and they are a nightshade in the same family as tomatoes and eggplants and peppers, and I got news for you. You don't peel the skin off a goji berry now, do you? So that's why goji berries are unfortunately not the superfood they're cracked up to be. Now there are some similar fruits that do qualify as a superfood. Right now, in most parts of North America, mulberries are coming into season. Mulberries, I have some of the coolest polyphenols that you can possibly imagine. I prefer you to use mulberry powder, but this is the time to eat mulberries. Soon in the fall pomegranates will be available, and no, please don't drink pomegranate juice. It's pure sugar. But pomegranate and the oil in the seed has some of the greatest compounds that you will ever encounter. Much better choices. Wheatgrass. I see this all the time. Now just remember that wheatgrass, the idea that we should actually be consuming wheatgrass, start at the Hippocrates Institute in Florida, and I have several patients who were former staff members there, and the idea originally was in people with cancer who were coming there, one of the ideas was to try and make cancer patients throw up. And the founder noticed that when dogs want to vomit, they eat a lot of grass. And sure enough, as anyone knows, it will make a dog vomit very effectively. So they got the idea that grass makes people vomit. And in fact, wheatgrass is a very powerful source of gluten and gluten-like proteins, as is barleygrass, as is ryegrass. So please read the labels of your green drinks or your superfood drinks. And if you see the word wheatgrass or barleygrass or ryegrass, please run the other way. I have so many patients on a gluten-free diet who do not know that there is gluten-like materials in wheatgrass, and they have celiac disease, and when we take their green drinks away from them with wheatgrass, that was the thing that flipped the switch and made them no longer celiac. Want a better option? Moringa. Moringa is often called a superfood for very good reasons because Moringa is edible, it has a high amount of protein in the leaves, and Moringa is your new wheatgrass. And Moringa is readily available, and look for it wherever you can find it. One of my favorite, chia seeds. Chia seeds have lectins, I'm sorry folks. Chia seeds are from South America and Central America, and they do contain a lectin. Now the great news is there's something a whole lot better that works even better than chia seeds, and that is basil seeds, sweet basil seeds. They actually plump up faster, they don't have a lectin, and they have some fantastic health-promoting compounds in them, polyphenols that chia seeds do not contain. And so if you're looking for the chia experience, please get yourself basil seeds. They're really cheap, you can get them on Amazon, I shouldn't tell you that because now I probably won't be able to get any, but they are just fantastic for every place you would consider using chia seeds. How about quinoa? Now quinoa also is a South American pseudo grain, yes, the Incas use quinoa, they used it as a major grain fuel source, but the Incas did not just throw quinoa in a bucket of water and boil it. They soaked quinoa first, then they allowed it to rot, they fermented it, and if you listen to me enough, fermentation is a very effective way of diminishing the lectin content of any food. Bacteria like to enjoy eating certain lectins, and so bacterial fermentation of quinoa made it then much less harmful to them, and you don't see the idea of fermentation on the package directions. Now there's a much better alternative to quinoa and that's millet or sorghum, neither of these have a hall, they don't have a lectin, and you can use them really interchangeably any place you'd use quinoa. So please stay away from those ancient superfoods. And while I'm on it, ancient grains, I see this all the time, this is made of ancient grains. Well, number one, grains aren't very ancient in the human diet. We've only been eating grains for about 10,000 years. Rice has only been around for 8,000 years. And if you think that ancient grains are any more helpful, let me remind you that the Iceman, the frozen man found in the Northern Italian Alps, who is about 5,000 years old, who was riddled with arthritis, and apparently a fairly young man, he had ancient grains in his pocket of his wrap. And I got news for you, that's where he got his arthritis. So there's nothing ancient about grains that make them any more healthy. They are not. So just when you see that buzzword made from ancient grains, they're going to make you ancient sooner than you would want. Okay, so here's another myth I want to address. And this keeps coming up, particularly in my patient population. Some people think that if a starchy food doesn't have lectins and it appears on the yes list, then it's okay for them to eat and to eat in abandon. So let me explain why that's not true. So remember that a resistant starch or a starch is eventually going to turn into sugar. And how fast that starch becomes sugar is predicated, really, on how fast that you actually digest those starches, those long sugar molecules apart. So it's one thing to, let's say, take a tarot root, cassava, and cook a cassava. And eat it whole. And it's quite another thing to grind that cassava into a fine flour and then use it as a flour. What you've done in the process of mechanically breaking those starches down is you've broken those starches into finer and finer and finer molecules so that you're able to digest those starches quickly, as if they were sugar. And food companies have known this for a very long time. We didn't know they were doing it. So for instance, you can take whole grain wheat or whole grain oats and pulverize it with a Swiss roller mill and make it into ultra fine starches, after all, wheat's mostly starch. And you will absorb that faster than if you actually ate straight sugar. And it will go into your bloodstream as glucose faster than if you ate straight sugar. So I see so many of my patients say, oh, look, you know, cassava chips, those are fine. Or plantains, they're fine. And then they rush out and they buy cassava chips or plantain chips, and they're eating them by the bag full. And when they come in, number one, they've gained weight. Number two, their triglycerides are up. Remember, we convert these things first into triglycerides. And their insulin levels are up and their hemoglobin A1Cs are up. And they're shocked because they're eating safe foods. Well, they're not safe if you adulterate them into something that they originally weren't. So buyer beware, you're getting that plantain chip to dip it into guacamole as a way of getting guacamole into your mouth. You're getting that tarot root chip not to eat a bag of tarot root chips. You're getting it to get guacamole into your mouth not to eat these things. And I just see it all the time. I see people go on millet crazes and their triglycerides go up, their insulin goes up. So beware, just because it's lectin-free doesn't mean it's safe to eat in abundance. Our amazing episodes, just like this one, watch now.