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Dr. Bowden discusses the seven superfoods that can change your life.
Dr. Bowden:
The concept of superfoods is kind of interesting because I guess it came, it’s sort of a marketing gimmick in a way, but basically what we are talking about when we are talking about superfoods are foods that are just so loaded with nutrients, they are so nutrient-dense and usually for relatively low amount of calories.
So you’ve got kind of low-calorie, high-nutrient and very filled with antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, the kinds of things we are talking about.
And if I had to pick a bunch of these just off the top of my head, I think of wild salmon.
Why? Because it’s high in protein, high in omega-3 fatty acids, the best kind, and the thing that gives wild salmon its pink color is actually it comes from their natural diet, which is krill and crustaceans.
And those krill and crustaceans contain a very powerful red antioxidant called astaxanthin. You don’t get that in pond salmon. So, wild salmon is really are the way to go when you are talking about a superfood.
Blueberries, I would consider, anybody’s list of superfoods. Berries in general, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries or blueberries have been found to have compounds that are anti-cancer.
One of them, ellagic acid, is being investigated by the National Cancer Institute as a possible anticarcinogen.
Blueberries have been found in research to improve memory in lab animals. The lab animals, when they are fed an extract of blueberry and spinach they start behaving like little young bucks and they start to remember things and they do the maze faster and they just behaved more like younger rats.
So blueberry, salmon, grass-fed meat is a super food. Grass-fed meat is nothing like the meat that we get in the supermarket. It’s a different animal, so to speak.
It has a different fat content. It’s higher in omega-3s. It’s higher in a cancer-fighting fat called CLA.
It doesn’t have antibiotics and steroids in hormones, so grass-fed beef once or twice a week, really a good choice.
In the vegetable family anything that belongs to the brassica family of vegetables which is that, I call them vegetable royalty, that’s cabbage and kale and Brussels sprouts and cauliflower.
The reason being, that these contain plant chemicals called indoles which have a very positive effect on hormone metabolism and tend to be anti-cancer.
Interestingly enough the way that it was discovered was that researchers looked at Polish women coming to America and in Poland they had remarkably low rates of breast cancer.
And they came to America, these genetically same people, you know, the sisters and brothers of the same people came to America, started eating an American diet and breast cancer rates go up to the same as that in America.
So what is it about the diet, researchers wanted to know? And after a lot of investigation they isolated that these people ate a lot of cabbage, lot of these vegetables and they contained these plant chemicals called indoles.
So certainly kale and cabbage and Brussels sprouts and broccoli would all be among the super foods, without a question.
And then again you’ve got the berries and you’ve got protein sources like wild salmon and grass-fed beef and there’s a few others.
I mean, avocadoes would certainly be up there. Avocados surprisingly have a lot of fiber that people don’t know about.
And yes they have a lot of calories but it is all from good stuff.
And gosh, I mean I wrote a book called “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” and I’d say fully one-third of those are superfoods. So there’s a lot of different things in there.
Dr. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.:
Dr. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S, is a nutrition expert specializing in anti-aging and weight loss. Dr. Bowden has a Master’s Degree in psychology and counseling and a Ph.D. in nutrition. He has earned six national certifications in personal training and exercise. He is board certified by the American College of Nutrition and is adjunct faculty at Clayton College for Natural Health based in Birmingham, Alabama.
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