Are you making superfood smoothies? Spoiler: They may be the reason you’re gaining weight.

What started as a general, well-intentioned suggestion to eat a diet full of fruits and vegetables has now spiraled out of control. Instead of appreciating the produce that is so readily available at our local farmers markets and grocery stores, we’ve come to put exotic, hard-to-find, expensive powders, elixirs, and cold-pressed oils on a pedestal. Sure, they may boast all the nutritional benefits they’re being praised for, but are they actually doing your body any good?

Before I go into why you should shed the promises of the superfoods, let me define what I mean by “superfood” here.

The term is thrown around a lot and can mean many different things to a variety of people. Originally, a superfood was pegged as any food with an unusually dense nutrient content. Nowadays, it is used to describe something as mundane as an apple, simply because the apple is superbly good for you. For the purposes of this article, however, when I use the term “superfood”, I’m referring to all the health foods entering our market that usually come in powder, dried fruit and nut, or oil form. These superfoods are out of the ordinary for the American agricultural scene but have a growing fanfare for all their health promises.

This is not to say that superfoods don’t have their place – they do — but we shouldn’t blindly accept superfoods as the be-all-end-all ingredients to make us our healthiest selves. For some, superfoods open room for more creativity in the vegan kitchen, especially for superfood smoothies! For others, they are a necessary part of a strict dietary protocol that attends to a specific health woe or concern. And, of course, they can be super delicious! The key is in understanding that superfoods are superfluous, not foundational, and they aren’t nearly as super as you think.

Now that we are on the same page, let’s talk about why such superfoods are making you thicker around the middle and, in some cases, compromising your health.

Sugar is Sugar, Even Superfood Sugar

There’s no way to avoid it: sugar is sugar, no matter what form it’s in. If you eat too much sugar, it’ll strain your liver, lead to the accumulation of toxins, increase the risk for fungal infections, decrease brain function, and of course, metabolize directly into fat.

Agave, coconut palm sugar, lucuma, brown rice sugar, and variations of unprocessed regular white sugar, such as Demera and turbinado sugar, are still raising your blood sugar levels, even if not to the extent of white sugar. To get these superfood sugars’ nutritional benefits, you’d have to consume a whole lot more than reasonable. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve mastered sweetness without the potential side effects. Sure, there are better alternatives to white sugar out there, but that does not mean they warrant superfood status. These “superfood” sweeteners may be better for you, but they are just a lesser evil.

Nuts, Dried Fruits and Powders: Super Constipated

Nuts, dried fruits, and superfood powders are dense, concentrated in sugar or fat, and are often hard to digest. Goji berries, acai powder, cacao nibs, camu powder, chia seeds, nut/seed butters, hemp powder, and mulberry berries, among many many others, are prey to manipulative marketing techniques. Superfood companies sell this idea that you’ll be light-years better off with the addition of a cocktail of various dry products in your superfood smoothies. What they don’t say, however, is that a few superfoods later, your smoothie has tripled, if not quadrupled, in fat, calories, and sugar content. Make no mistake: you can gain weight from superfoods. In fact, adding them to your smoothie is the sneaky way many of us are loading in the fat, sugar, and calories. The idea that the smoothie is infused with only raw, vegan, purportedly miracle ingredients masks the reality of what we are consuming.

Meanwhile, many raw and vegan enthusiasts have popularized nut-based dishes as the go-to density provider in place of meat. A spoonful of almond butter or a handful of nuts is one thing, but basing an entire meal around nuts is a digestive disaster waiting to happen. Nuts are extremely fatty and caloric and having too much will simply make you gain weight.

When browsing new healthy recipes, I often see a lot of faux-cheese and dessert recipes based in cashews, and I am dumbfounded by the logic. Sure, it’s vegan, but what about your health? There are other ways to make vegan cheese or desserts without nuts as the core ingredient. When is it ever natural and healthy to have one or two cups full of nuts at any given time?

Healthy Fats: Still Making You Fat, if Not Fatter

I once had a client who complained about gaining weight. For all intents and purposes, her diet was flawless. She was a vegan who had a pantry and refrigerator stocked with chia seeds, kombucha, freekeh, kale, and the likes. She did her research and made sure to keep up with the newest and most promising dietary crazes. Still, she was gaining weight and having digestive issues. I asked her what she used for fat, and she said “coconut oil, of course.” Ah, there it was. The coconut oil craze has gone too far!

My client was mixing coconut oil in her coffee and smoothies, and she was cooking with it. If you look at coconut oil from an objective standpoint, it glimmers! Not only are its medium-chain fatty acids metabolized in a special way so that its inherent saturated fat isn’t as harmful as it normally would be but also it boasts incredible benefits for the skin, brain, and overall energy. But, is this true in practical use? I’ve witnessed conflicting results.

When we are told something is good for us, we tend to overdo it, and I think that is what happened with coconut oil and is happening with other oils, like grapeseed, avocado, and sesame oils. All fat, regardless of type, should be used minimally, and regular butter is actually easier to digest than coconut oil. Coconut oil leaves behind a slight residue in the body, making it a bit harder to digest than regular butter. Even though regular butter comes from milk, it does not contain the hard-to-digest casein protein. It goes down like, for lack of a better word, butter. At the end of the day, fat is fat in the same way sugar is sugar.

Once I advised my client to switch to regular butter, she felt almost instantly better. She naturally used less of it, and her digestion improved. For vegans out there, stick to coconut oil, but please don’t depend on it as its own food group. It is meant to accent a dish, not drown one.

How to Eat (Superfoods Optional)

Superfoods can be part of a balanced diet, but don’t depend on them as lifesavers. They aren’t necessary for a healthy lifestyle, and you can get by just wonderfully on local produce cheaply and readily available at your nearest grocery store.

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Lucuma is a Peruvian fruit that has been consumed since 200 A.D. To Peruvians, it it is the “Gold of the Incas”, an orange-yellow fruit that has long been a symbol of longevity and fertility. Today it is accessible as lucuma powder and has ascended the stairs of superfood status. Learn what lucuma is, what its benefits are and how to us it in the kitchen.

The lucuma fruit grows at altitudes of 2,500 to 10,000 feet, so is difficult to attain in its fresh fruit form. Today, it is sold as a powder in most health food stores. Lucuma has a distinct sweet taste. Many say it tastes like a combination of a sweet potato and maple syrup or a combination of a mango and an apricot. Because of its sweetness, lucuma can be used as a healthier, low-glycemic substitute for sugar.

In terms of its nutritional profile, lucuma is dressed to impress. In 2 tablespoons, it contains 20 calories, 2 grams of dietary fiber and 50 milligrams of potassium. It is high in beta-carotene, fiber, iron and vitamin B3 and it boasts anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and antibacterial properties. And because it ranks low on the glycemic scale, it is fit for people with diabetes or others looking to fight the effects of candida, or yeast overgrowth. Lucuma has also shown to aid those with high blood pressure.

In Peru, lucuma is a common ice cream flavor. Even though you won’t easily find such an ice cream in the U.S., you can introduce lucuma to your very own kitchen and experiment with it in beverages, such as adding a few spoonfuls to smoothies, mix into yogurt and cereal as well as blended desserts and baked goods.

Check out your local health food grocer for lucuma powder or look for it online.

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Acai berries! Kale! Spirulina! Quinoa!

Oh the world of superfoods, where some foods just get a better reputation than others. But when it comes to healthy eating, are superfoods actually doing us more harm than good?

The first problem with superfoods is that there is actually no definition of what a superfood is. In fact, if anything, the term “superfood” is used more for marketing purposes than health. Be honest: if you see “superfood” on the label of something at the market, you consider buying it now don’t you?

Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. In a time where fast food rules the world, agribusiness keeps us eating anything and everything made from corn, and obesity rates are skyrocketing, it’s no surprise that we’re looking for ways to eat better, and incorporate more healthy ingredients into our diets. That’s why the “superfoods” term has caught on so well.

In general, superfoods are foods that are “nutrient powerhouses.” In other words, they pack a nutrient punch; full of lots of vitamins and minerals and all the good things that a body on the Standard American Diet (yes, it’s SAD) naturally wants more of, even if it’s on a subconscious level. When it comes down to it, there are a lot of foods that could qualify as a superfood. We live in a culture of “bigger and better” and just like we want fast cars and larger houses, we want food that ups the ante on all the other foods.

However, the problem with superfoods is that the concept gets us focusing on individual ingredients instead of diets as a whole. No one is going to argue that eating kale or blueberries isn’t good for you, but individually targeting certain foods distracts our attention from not only a lot of other foods that are good for us – hello, why doesn’t anyone care about celery root?! – but also it encourages a mentality of “if only I eat a few extra good things, I can continue eating whatever I like.”

Let me break it down for you: popping exotic berries into a smoothie is not going to make you immortal, or even get you to the age of 90, and it certainly isn’t going to offset the negative effects of a poor diet. Sure, you may eat a raw acai bowl for breakfast every morning, but if that’s followed by a can of Coca-Cola at lunch, then you can forget about taking advantage of all the nutritional benefits of your morning meal.

When we put certain individual ingredients on a  pedestal, it also keeps us from thinking locally. This is often the problem with superfoods marketing, as you’ll commonly find lots of foods that come from nowhere near your backyard. Let’s take goji berries for example. Do you know where goji berries come from? They may be branded as the Himalayan superfood, invoking images of tranquil fields in the foothills of mountains, but the reality is that the majority of goji crops hail from industrial fields in Northwestern China. And hey, even if we get sick of that superfood, the food marketing world will always come up with another exotic option to replace it with. Kakadu plum anyone?

While superfoods may seem like a healthy alternative to all the chips, cookies and other processed foods on the market, don’t let yourself think that these food companies are operating in your best interest; they’re applying savvy marketing principles just like all the other food companies and brands on the market.

Superfoods can, and do, get recalled – Sunburst Superfoods had to recall a raw carob powder earlier this year – and companies that market them definitely get reprimanded for mismarketing their so-called incredible benefits. One of the more notable cases was POM, the seller of pomegranate juice, who the FDA charged for making “false and unsubstantiated claims that their products will prevent or treat heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction.” Proof that you can never believe the marketing claims on food packaging, even if the food product in question appears to be a health food.

Superfoods in and of themselves aren’t hurting us, but the concept and marketing of superfoods certainly is, so much so that it’s probably time that we simply got rid of the term “superfoods” entirely. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a superfood,” Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, told the Washington Post. “All plant foods — fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains — have useful nutrients. The whole point about diets is to vary food intake, because the nutrient contents of various foods differ and complement each other.”

In Europe, the use of the term “superfood” is in fact banned, and if we know one thing about the Europeans it’s this: they tend to have a much better relationship to food than we do, certainly a more well balanced one.

But beyond the effects (or lack thereof) of superfoods on our health, there’s something else that’s even more important to consider: the effect on the people that grow them. The popularity of quinoa has made it so that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, quinoa’s native growing spot, can’t afford the grain that once sustained them.

Our obsession with exotic superfoods also has a negative affect on growers back here at home. As Tom Philpott pointed out in an article in Mother Jones last year, “The domestic blueberry, for example, is periodically (and justifiably) marketed as a superfood, and in 2012, products featuring blueberries as a primary ingredient saw their sales nearly quadruple. But they only raked in $3.5 million—less than 2 percent of açaí-based product sales.” In a world where so many people are talking about eating more local and supporting communities closer to home, do these kind of sales statistics make any sense to you? It’s as if we have to say, “sorry blueberry farmers, your berries just aren’t as sexy as the ones that come from far away.”

Want to eat healthy? It’s not a well-packaged bundle of berries that’s going to be your solution. Skip the aisle full of health claims, and walk right over to that produce aisle and fill your basket with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Eat whole grains. Make your daily diet of real foods that don’t come from the other side of the world.

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ColumnReal food isn’t a lifestyle accessory; it’s a necessity.

I was scrolling through Instagram the other day, you know, as you do. I follow a lot of people that are into food. Big surprise there. A lot of them are health focused in some way, shape or form, their focus being on eating whole foods and eating well. All things I can get behind. On the day in question, it occurred to me how “tropical” these feeds felt. A coconut milk smoothie here, a banana ice cream there. Sure there were more local summer berries and greens, but it felt like every recipe or dish I came across had a “zinger” ingredient; the thing that popped out as the “look at me I am a wonderfood! Aren’t I amazing?!” And these were not people living on tropical islands where they could walk out the door and go get all said ingredients.

I like coconut milk. I like ice cream made from bananas (sidenote: the process of making vegan ice cream with a frozen banana is kind of amazing). I like chia seeds. But all of these ingredients are sexy and exotic. Yes, they’re healthy and good for us (we do love the big ole S word, now don’t we?), but so are flaxseeds and a multitude of other really boring foods. Those don’t get the attention they deserve, because we’re busy focused on the more entertaining, flashy stuff.

That’s because food has become fashionable, particularly in the world of the internet. No, your breakfast did not wake up like that.

There was a day and age when all we had were cookbooks, and a cookbook was a collection of words and measurements and not much else. Then came the camera and the proliferation of food magazines and soon we were drooling over appetizing images of foods we dreamed of making. We would probably never get around to most of them, but with the magazine in front of us, we could at least believe that we would. Lifestyle porn at its best (or should I say, worst?).

Nowadays it has all gotten a whole lot worse, most of us obsessed with how things look as opposed to what’s actually in them. But food isn’t a lifestyle accessory; it’s a necessity.

We need to eat to live, but in modern society for so many of us, food has become fashionable. A bottle of cold-pressed juice in your hand is just as much an accessory as the bracelet you put on before you went out the door. It says something about you. It makes a statement.

There are plenty of people who can’t afford real food. Then there are those of us who can, and we’re focused on dousing everything in coconut milk, forgetting how far that can had to travel to get to us. We become blinded by the popularity of certain foods that we forget their ultimate impact. We eat because it’s trendy, not because it’s what sustains us.

I was flipping through a magazine the other day and there was a sidebar on the benefits of eating local foods, right next to a recipe for some mango, lime, passion fruit concoction. The irony was not beside me.

Can we all commit to not being seduced by all the sexy and exotic foods? Use a few exotic ingredients here and there, but turn the focus back to what’s around you.

Because we really do need to get back to the real foods that come from nearby, not just for the environmental carbon footprint argument, but because food grounds us, it gives us a sense of place. Stand in an orchard and eat an apple off the tree and you’ll know what I am talking about.

It may be fashionable to throw in a trendy ingredient, but that doesn’t make it real food. That just makes it something that’s Instagram-worthy.

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ColumnAçaí berries, goji berries, maca powder… seems like everyone is superfoods obsessed these days.

Superfoods.

If you’ve walked into any health food store, coop or upscale market in the last few years, you know exactly what I am talking about. Hell, you don’t even need to have done any of the above. The marketing of superfoods is so out of control you can find them just about anywhere.

There’s actually no concrete definition of superfoods, and no regulation of the word’s use, which means it can really be slapped on just about anything. In everyday language, superfoods are foods that are especially nutrient-rich. In other words: foods that are good for you. Which is why it’s high time we dropped the word “superfoods.”

There are many foods that make the superfood roundups, but while it’s the more exotic ones that are having their fifteen minutes of fame right now. Açaí berries, goji berries, maca powder; wouldn’t your life be better if you had all of these in a breakfast bowl?

While superfoods certainly offer health benefits, it’s our obsession with the idea of superfoods that’s the root problem.

For one, whatever happened to the lovely blueberry? It packs a lot of antioxidants and touts plenty of health benefits, yet we seem seduced by the thought of goji berries instead. Might I point out that a lot of goji berries come from industrial fields in China? Not so super now, are they?

The idea of superfoods pulls us towards certain ingredients and keeps us from running down the list of conscious consumer questions we should always be asking: Where did these come from? Who grew them? How far did they travel to get to me?

There are plenty of foods growing near you, sometimes even in your back yard, that are perfect options for healthy eating. And yet without a superfoods label they’re not super sexy. Sweet potatoes? Boring. Durian? How exciting!

Would you go to the farmers market and pick up a vegetable and ask the farmer “is this a superfood?” and then not buy it if the farmer said no? No, no you would not. Although while we’re on the subject, probably everything on that farmers table could be considered a superfood. Because it’s real food. Real produce. Stuff that’s good for you. But you know that; it doesn’t need a marketing term to tell you that.

We need to reassess what we’re eating and why. Eating closer to home is good for the economy, the environment and ultimately, ourselves. Eating can give us a connection to place. It’s what grounds us in the rhythm of the seasons and the natural world. That being said, next time you’re on a river cruise on the Amazon, go ahead and stuff your face with those açaí berries.

But aren’t superfoods good for me?

Well, yes, that’s why someone deemed them superfoods in the first place. All these foods, local or exotic, have nutrients that our body needs, but it’s not because you throw goji berries and some chia seeds into your morning smoothie everyday that you’re going to be full of energy and ready to take on the world. The problem with the hype around superfoods is that it leads us to believe that single ingredients are the solution to all of our problems.

Superfoods will not save the world–they won’t even save you. What will? Eating a balanced diet. Not buying processed foods, even when they claim to have superfoods in them. Eating locally whenever possible. Not buying berries from China. Growing your own garden with plenty of leafy greens.

You don’t need superfoods. You just need real food.

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The post Açaí Berries, Goji Berries and Beyond: Can We Stop Talking About ‘Superfoods’? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

The pomegranate is nutritious, delicious, and its unique design could be a key ingredient in super-powerful rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. 

Beautiful and tasty, the pomegranate is also a powerful superfood. The benefits of pomegranate juice are almost as plentiful as the seeds contained under its thick, pink skin. Now new research has shown that a healthy heart, happier stomach, and stronger skin and hair aren’t the pomegranate’s only life-improving benefits.

According to a study out of Stanford University, the way pomegranate seeds are clustered together within the fruit’s rind provided an important clue for inventors looking to design the next generation of lithium-ion batteries.

“Silicon anodes could store 10 times more charge than the graphite anodes in today’s rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but they also have major drawbacks: The brittle silicon swells and falls apart during battery charging, and it reacts with the battery’s electrolyte to form gunk that coats the anode and degrades its performance,” explain researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a joint effort of Stanford and the DOE.

An electrode designed like a pomegranate – with silicon nanoparticles clustered like seeds in a tough carbon rind – could allow battery developers to overcome these remaining obstacles, and finally pave the way for silicon based lithium-ion batteries.

Yi Cui, the lead researcher on this project, has spent the better part of a decade working on a way to encase silicon nanoparticles in carbon ‘yolk shells’ that give them room to swell and shrink during charging. Just like the pomegranate’s skin protects the seeds within, these carbon rinds hold the nanopartical clusters together and provide a sturdy highway for electrical currents.

“Experiments showed our pomegranate-inspired anode operates at 97 percent capacity even after 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging, which puts it well within the desired range for commercial operation,” said Cui.

This means that batteries built to mimic the pomegranate could hold 10 times more charge than a standard rechargeable lithium-ion battery, an improvement that could revolutionize the smartphone industry as well as all the other wireless gadgets that depend on battery power.

Now that they’ve demonstrated the pomegranate battery’s power storage potential, Cui and his team have to tackle new challenges, like a simpler process and a cheaper source of silicon nanoparticles. They say one possible source of silicon could be found in rice husks, a common type of inedible food waste.

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ColumnIs food marketing making us superficial when it comes to buying and eating food?

“You really realize how superficial people are.”

That quote was from a Senegalese chef who is trying to get more people eating fonio, a grain from West Africa. He’s profiled in a piece in the Guardian looking at his efforts to make fonio the new quinoa, aka the foodie darling grain. His quote is in reference to the branding and packaging that it will take in order to make fonio popular in the American market.

Essentially what he’s saying is that we can’t just eat things because they’re good for us, we need them to be cool first.

Look at kale. Look at quinoa. Buzz words in the foodie world. I love kale as much as the next person (ok, admittedly maybe a little more than the next person), but what about mustard greens and chard? And the quinoa? What about millet?

We like to accuse the industrial food world of using food marketing to keep people eating unhealthy, citing examples of sugar cereal that’s branded as part of a complete breakfast. But let’s not kid ourselves, the healthy food world does it too.

Take the example of superfoods. First of all, there is no exact definition of the word “superfood.” You can slap that name on any food that is power-packed with nutrients. Second of all, do you know where your superfoods are coming from? Sure, goji berries might be good for your health, but the majority of them are grown on industrial fields in China. We say we want to be locavores and then we go dousing our salads in berries and grains that are imported from across the world.

As The Observer’s restaurant critic Jay Rayner wrote in a recent column, “What really gets me is the smugness of the people who push this stuff. They claim to have stumbled upon some truth the rest of us have missed. Which is: nuts, berries and greens are good for us. Big bloody news. Put out the bunting.”

We are superficial.

We want an easy fix, and we want it to look good. Why do you think it took so many people to get on board the bulk shopping train? I’d argue that filling up your own bags with bulk grains isn’t really that sexy. Or at least not compared to a pretty box with a stylized and illustrated logo.

We skip over a good recipe because it has no photo, but we ogle over the one with a heavy dose of food porn where the recipe itself isn’t worth a damn. We buy $8 juice because it’s in a trendy looking bottle and secretly we want people to see us with it, but we’ve never attempted juicing anything at home. We tout the values of buying organic, and we pick up bunches of bananas, carted over in massive shipping containers from the other hemisphere.

Let’s get real. Greens, nuts and grains have been good for us for a long time. Since the start of time really. We know what’s good for us, and deep down, we know perfectly well what we should and shouldn’t be eating.

Let’s work on being less superficial and just eating instead.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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Due to its alcohol content, wine is often shunned as luxury in a healthy diet, a once-in-awhile enjoyment. However, next time you sip, you should do so with the added knowledge that red wine is a superfood in its own right!

Red wine is beneficial for people who have high cholesterol. In one study, those who consumed a grape supplement found in red wine witnessed a 9-percent decrease in their LDL (bad) cholesterol levels. Those with high cholesterol levels experienced an even bigger drop — 12 percent. Looks like the grapes in wine are not diluted by the alcohol after all and still bear incredible benefits. The antioxidants in red wine, which are called polyphenols, contribute to a healthy heart and can prevent heart disease.

The polyphenols in red wine also bear anti-inflammatory properties, which can positively contribute to the prevention of a slew of diseases. Polyphenols may also lower the sex hormone levels and protect against breast cancer.

The benefits of red wine are also due to the compound resveratrol, which is found in the skin of wine grapes. Resveratrol has anti-diabetic effects. Studies have shown that resveratrol reduced blood glucose in animals with hyperglycemia, which may be due to the improved transport of glucose between cells.

Resveratrol has also been linked to having neuro-protective properties and may be especially helpful to those who suffer from Alzheimer’s or simply what to boost brain health. Researchers also suggest drinking one glass of red wine 3-4 times per week can starve young cancer cells, which means that red wine may play a big role in the prevention of cancer.

The benefits of red wine are plenty. Cheers to that!

Image Credit: Desegura89

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Superfoods can be quite intimidating. Aside from the regular fruits and vegetables we get from our local grocer, which are worthy superfoods in all their simplistic glory, the more exotic superfoods, such as nuts, seeds, dried fruit and powders, can be difficult to incorporate into your everyday diet.

However, it doesn’t have to be. If you look closely, there are many loopholes in your already existing diet where the addition of some superfood will either go unnoticed or only enhance the flavor of whatever you are eating. The following tips help you to bring nutritious superiority to your meals in a seamless manner.

When you want to make superfoods a meal highlight, it’s hard to imagine how nuts, seeds and dried fruit can make the cut. The thing is, a little goes a long way, so there is no reason to overdo these relatively dense, heavy superfoods because they are just as equally potent in terms of nutrition. Sure, every once in awhile a supefood burger makes for a unique alternative to its beef-based alternative. Get used to adding a handful of superfood nuts, seeds, and dried fruits to salads or eating them plain as a snack. Any nut, seed or dried fruit-based meal can clog your digestive system and be too heavy to enjoy on the reg.

For any superfood butters, simply add them to your morning oatmeal or mix into a smoothie. I like to take whole raw nuts and dried fruit, process them until grainy and able to hold together, and then eat the mix rolled up in a collard green leaf. It’s a mini, hassle-free snack!

I find powders the easiest to work with because they are easy to hide in almost any dish. I don’t particularly like the taste of spirulina or hemp on their own, so I add a tablespoon, give or take, to a morning fruit smoothie. The fruit cuts the flavor while letting the vitamins and nutrients take control. I also sprinkle the powder over salads, mix lightly into soups, add to the batter of baked goods, or even fold into veggies burger mixes to help hold the “meat” together.

However you enjoy superfoods, remember that they aren’t worth your time if they aren’t easy to fit into your lifestyle. If you keep your creations simple, you can benefit from their super powers without the fuss.

Photo Credit: Geoff Peters 604

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‘Tis the season of sweet treats! Avoid all the toxic sugar and food coloring with this nutritious truffle recipe from Debbie Adler, author of Sweet Debbie’s Organic Treats: Allergy-Free & Vegan Recipes.

If a blueberry walked into a bar and hooked up with a cosmopolitan piece of chocolate sass, their love child would be this açaí berry truffle recipe. you would get a taste of açaí. A popular berry from Brazil, açaí conveniently comes in powdered form, so you can easily add it to this truffle recipe. Unlike their store-bough counterparts, these raw truffles are filled with calcium and vitamins A, B6 and E, and are high in antioxidants.

No-Bake Açaí Berry Truffle Recipe

Yield: About 18 Truffles

Ingredients & Materials for Truffles

8 x 8-inch sheet of parchment paper
12 Medjool dates, pitted and halved
1 cup raw sunflower seeds
1 cup raw pumpkin seeds
3 tablespoons açaí powder
3 tablespoons frozen (thawed) cranberries
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice
2 teaspoons cacao powder
1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt

Topping

½ cup unsweetened shredded coconut

Instructions

1. Line an 8 x 8-inch square baking pan with parchment paper.
2. Combine the dates, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, açaí powder, cranberries, orange juice, cacao powder and salt in a
food processor or blender and process until almost smooth.
3. Take about 1 tablespoon of the date mixture, and with wet hands, shape it into a ball. Place the ball on the prepared pan.
4. Repeat until you have used up all the date mixture.
5. Pour the shredded coconut into a small bowl. Roll each ball in the coconut and place it back on the prepared pan. Put the truffles in the freezer to chill for at least 1 hour.
6. Place the truffles in a sealable plastic bag and keep them frozen until ready to eat.

Nutrition Information Per Serving (1 truffle):
110 calories, 5 g total fat, 0.0 mg cholesterol,
15 g carbohydrates, 30 mg sodium, 3 g fiber,
3 g protein, 9 g sugars

Debbie Adler is the owner and biggest nosher at Sweet Debbie’s Organic Cupcakes in Los Angeles. Her debut cookbook, Sweet Debbie’s Organic Treats: Allergy-Free & Vegan Recipes, features 50 delicious recipes for muffins, brownies, cookies, cupcakes, bread and even energy bars that are safe for everyone to eat–every recipe in her book is gluten, dairy, soy, nut and sugar free!

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Image and recipe copyright Debbie Adler

The post Easy No-Bake Açaí Berry Truffle Recipe appeared first on EcoSalon.