Superfoods Benefits

Superfoods, by my definition, are foods that can offer superior nourishment in a natural form. This is nutrition as it is created by nature, and so basically includes foods that are wild harvested or untampered with genetically.

Many of the foods that are in our supermarkets are from commercially grown crops that over decades of selective breeding or genetic modification, have had much of their nutrition bread out of them in favour of preferences in tastes, farming efficiencies and yields. This practice has potentially caused many of the beneficial phytochemicals in our foods to be lost.

Superfoods, on the other hand, are quite occassionally new to the food industry, and are not available on a wide scale. I would include in this category foods such as acai, camu camu, maqui, sacha inchi, graviola, cupuacu, lucuma, mesquite and chia seeds. Many of these foods were widely unknown by most of the world even as little as a decade ago, although venerated by the local populations where these foods are naturally occurring.

Much still needs to be learnt about many of these superfoods, another indication of how new many of these products are to the food industry, but what seems to be agreed is that by going back to the wild and harnessing foods in their natural forms, with all their nutritional benefits intact, we are harnessing what nature has to offer, which is amazingly advanced combinations of nutrients that seem to be wonderfully balanced to supply us with what our bodies require to flourish.

Another added benefit of superfoods is that they generally come from areas in our time that are small developed, and still exist because their natural environments have been untouched. This is why many of these foods come from places like the Amazon Jungle, Patagonia, the Peruvian Andes, the Tibetan Himalayas, the Pacific Isles. By this very fact, many of these foods are also naturally organic - far from areas of commercial farming and crop spraying.

What this means is that by harvesting these superfoods, and giving them economic value through their sales around the world, the local populations aim to protect these areas, as the natural fauna has more value kept intact than cleared for commercial farming. It also means that sometimes the harvesting of these foods provide local communities with a means for sustainable economic growth.

So lets celebrate nature's wealth of nutrients in all its varieties, supplied to us by nature in its own unique and special combinations. We have within our reach a true powerhouse of natural ingredients to provide us with the nutrition we need for healthy living.