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How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

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Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#21

Post by yumaikas »

whathaschanged wrote: post #20
yumaikas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#22

Post by logfromblammo »

Darmani wrote: post #4
jerf wrote: post #3

"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 someo…

Both energy drinks and milk absorb better than water. Doesn't seem odd that coconut water is in the and category.

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#23

Post by gxs »

will_brown wrote: post #19

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 beneficia…

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#24

Post by jerf »

Darmani wrote: post #4
jerf wrote: post #3

"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 someo…

Both energy drinks and milk absorb better than water. Doesn't seem odd that coconut water is in the and category.

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.)

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#25

Post by maccard »

jerf wrote: post #24
Darmani wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both energy drinks and milk absorb better than water. Doesn't seem odd that coconut water is in the and category.

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 a…

Pseudo source - https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandst...

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#26

Post by pera »

Retric wrote: post #16
padthai wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#27

Post by maxxxxx »

yumaikas wrote: post #17
whathaschanged wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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".

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

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#28

Post by blacksmith_tb »

yumaikas wrote: post #17
whathaschanged wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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".

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#29

Post by cratermoon »

maxxxxx wrote: post #11
whathaschanged wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: How super are those pricey 'superfoods'?

#30

Post by sushid »

maxxxxx wrote: post #9
wlesieutre wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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