With schoolwork ramping up and the holiday season creeping closer, it’s easy to put your health on the backburner while you try to juggle everything at once. Even if you don’t have the time to exercise regularly, maintaining a proper diet is key to maintaining your overall health — which is where superfoods come in handy.
What is a superfood? It’s a term invented by people in marketing who want you to buy a product, even if the logic behind the word is unsound and often has no basis in reality. But none of that matters, because anything with the word “super” in it has to be good. (Like Superman. Or the hit CW show Supernatural!) Help combat winter flab with these six superfluous superfoods!
1) Kale: Loaded with calcium and antioxidant-boosting vitamins, kale has become the go-to superfood for its diversity in the kitchen. As part of a salad, blended into a smoothie, on its own as kale chips — these are all ways in which you’ll fantasize about using kale before inevitably throwing the wilted leaves away after weeks of neglect. Luckily kale already tastes like dirt, so the transition from produce to compost will be even more seamless.
2) Beetroot juice: A simple combination of juiced beets and a few other added citruses contains 80 per cent of your daily vitamin A and 40 per cent of your daily vitamin C, which you’ll never actually get because beet juice is awful. It also never stops being alarming how red your pee gets after consuming a bunch of beets.
3) Cauliflower: Ignoring for a moment that it looks like terminally-ill broccoli, the internet was a-buzz back in January that 2014 was the year of cauliflower. I could list off all of the reasons why the vegetable is great for you — and there are a lot of them — but it won’t matter. Four out of five times you’ll go for something that’s more convenient, doesn’t look like brains, and isn’t nearly as good for you. Like carrots. Have you actually ever stopped to think about what carrots taste like? They’re bland as shit, but people love them because they’re brightly coloured and come in smaller ‘baby’ form. You’re pathetic.
4) Acai Berry: Achee? Ahsee? No one really knows how you’re supposed to pronounce acai, which means it’s even healthier for you. Full of antioxidants and heart-healthy fats, acai berries are the perfect superfood to impulsively buy without any real understanding about what they are or what they taste like.
5) Quinoa: Sure, why not? Are you really going to argue with me on this one? Do you even know what quinoa is? You probably thought it was a pasta until someone had to correct you. Quinoa is high in protein, an ideal source of dietary fibre, and is gluten-free — which we all know is supposed to be good for you. Quinoa is as super as superfoods come.
6) Yard trimmings: If you’re lucky enough to have a yard, then you have ready access to this incredible superfood. Yard trimmings are organic, ready to eat, and come in a variety of flavours, depending on the conditions under which they were grown and what kinds of life forms were living on them when you mowed the lawn. Plus they’re dirt cheap!
