The popularity of the acai berry as a so-called “superfood” is a triumph of marketing over reality. This is a berry from the Amazon that was eaten by local people – because it was available – but was then marketed by a company called Sambazon and became an international sensation.

There are lots of berries around the world that are a fairly good source of vitamins, but none of them deserve the moniker “super”. That is pure marketing hype. Acai is bitter (does anyone actually like acai?) and has to be imported from the Amazon, while if you live in the US there are lots of better choices, like blueberries. Why would people bother? Because they were lied to by celebrities.

The idea is that a superfood packs so much nutrition, including things like antioxidants, that they have specific health benefits. This is not a credible claim, and there is no solid scientific data to back up such claims. Generally the companies trying to market these foods will finance some studies designed to generate marketing copy, but nothing am0unting to serious research.

The very concept of a “superfood” is flawed, and likely to be counterproductive. What matters is one’s entire diet, not one component of the diet. The best approach is a simple one – eat a varied diet containing plenty of fruits and vegetables. That’s it – there, I just saved you from having to buy any healthy eating books, spending time or money on fancy diets, or obsessing over minutiae regarding your diet. Just eat your fruits and veg.

If you want to make sure your diet is varied enough, then read up on some basic nutrition facts (like we all had to in middle school). If you are healthy then it’s not complicated – again, variety is your friend. If you have a medical condition or a family history affected by your diet then you will want to consult a health expert for special dietary issues.

You can get pretty close to an optimal diet by simply following that basic guide, but people often obsess, trying to squeeze out an extra percent or two of benefit (of course, they have been false lead to believe the benefits are much more). You end up spending lots of money and time, and likely do more harm than good. Relying on an alleged superfood is likely to make your diet less varied and may also give you a false sense of security.

This also relates to another inherent flaw in the superfood narrative – it is largely based on the notion that if some is good, then more must be better. But nutrition (and biology in general) does not work that way. Once you are getting enough vitamins, more is of no magical benefit.

Since almost every item marketed as a superfood makes the antioxidant claim, let me quickly review why this is also bunk. Your body makes its own antioxidants, and they are 1000 times (literally) more potent than anything you can eat. We evolved a dynamic homeostasis in which our mitochondria produce oxygen free radicals as part of generating energy from food. The oxygen radicals can cause cell damage, which is why we produce the antioxidant to scavenge these oxygen radicals before they can do damage. But (this is critical) our immune systems also use oxygen radicals as part of how they kill invading cells. Also, oxygen radicals are a good measure of metabolism, so we also evolved to use them as a signal to also perform other important measures to keep cells healthy.

If it were better to shift this balance in the direction of anti-oxidants, we would have evolved that balance already. You are not going to hack millions of years of evolution and make is better simply by eating some anti-oxidants. This is not something you need to worry about – unless you have a genetic illness which impairs your normal anti-oxidants. And of course, the clinical research does not show any benefit to routine supplementation with anti-oxidants (it’s actually possible with high enough doses to cause harm, but this is not clear in the research).

Researchers had this figured out two decades ago, but the marketing ploy of “superfoods” and “anti-oxidants” is still effective, so companies are still exploiting this bit of fiction. They are also always on the look out for the next superfood – it’s a great money-making formula. Find some obscure food that no one wants, create false hype about it being a superfood, as a bonus you can pay for some bogus research you can spin to support this narrative, get a celebrity to endorse it, and then watch people flock to trendy cafes to give you their money.