If superfoods are effective, why isn't the medical community adopting them as a first-line treatment?

Let's Talk Straight About "Superfoods" and "First-line Treatment"

Hey, it's an excellent question and one that puzzles many. Why do we constantly see news headlines raving about how amazing blueberries, kale, and turmeric are, but when you get sick, your doctor writes a prescription for chemical pills instead of a dietary plan?

This can be unpacked from several angles. I'll explain it as plainly as possible.

Think of "superfoods" and "first-line treatment drugs" like two different things:

Superfoods: Are like "quality building materials" for your house. Good bricks and good cement naturally make your house stronger, more durable, and less prone to problems.
First-line drugs: Are like the "fire brigade and fire extinguishers" when your house is on fire. They're specifically designed to tackle existing, urgent, and specific problems.

See, one is for long-term maintenance and prevention, while the other is for emergency treatment and firefighting. You wouldn't expect a pile of quality bricks to put out a fire by itself, right?

Let's break it down further:

1. The Dose and Concentration Problem: "Dose Makes the Poison" (Ignoring dose is irresponsible)

This is the core issue.

Many beneficial compounds in "superfoods," like anthocyanins in blueberries or curcumin in turmeric, have indeed been shown in studies to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, etc., effects. But! In scientific research, they often use high-purity, high-concentration extracts.

For example: A study finds that "curcumin" can inhibit the growth of a certain cancer cell. The experiment likely used 95% pure curcumin capsules. Meanwhile, the turmeric powder you use for cooking might only contain about 3% curcumin. To achieve the effective dose used in the study, you might need to eat half a pound of turmeric powder a day – which is clearly unrealistic and your stomach couldn't handle it.

Drugs are different. They are standardized, concentrated doses of the active ingredient. When a doctor prescribes a 500mg pill, it delivers a solid, predictable 500mg dose, nothing more, nothing less, to precisely achieve the therapeutic blood concentration needed.

2. Standardization and Stability: Every Berry is "Zhang"

The blueberries you buy today versus next week could vary wildly in anthocyanin content due to differences in origin, season, variety, and ripeness. Medical treatment requires stability and predictability.

Doctors need treatment plans that produce predictable results for all patients. They can confidently say, "Take this pill, and the drug will reach peak concentration in your blood in 8 hours and start working." But they can't say, "Eat two pounds of blueberries, and the effect... might roughly, perhaps, maybe be okay?" That level of uncertainty is unacceptable in life-saving medicine.

3. Different Levels of Evidence: "Maybe Associated" vs. "Proven Effective"?

The medical field has a very strict "gold standard" for judging whether a treatment works: the "randomized double-blind controlled trial (RCT)." In short, researchers take a large group of patients, randomly split them into two groups. One group gets the real drug, the other gets an identical-looking "placebo" (like a starch pill). Neither the patients nor the doctors running the trial know who got what. Finally, they compare the outcomes from both groups. Only therapies that pass this rigorous test prove they "definitely work."

Much research on superfoods, however, is "observational." For instance, scientists might observe that people who eat broccoli regularly seem to have a lower chance of getting a certain disease. But this doesn't prove broccoli caused the lower risk. People who eat broccoli might also exercise more, not smoke, have higher incomes, get more check-ups... they might have a whole range of healthier habits. This is called "correlation does not equal causation."

Achieving drug-level research on foods is extremely expensive and highly susceptible to confounding factors that are hard to eliminate.

4. Different Goals: "Curing Disease" vs. "Preventing Disease"

Medicine (First-line treatment): Aims at "curing disease" (zhì jǐ bìng). If you have a bacterial infection, antibiotics are needed to kill the bacteria. If your blood pressure spikes to 180, blood pressure medication must be used to quickly bring it down and prevent a stroke. This is fighting the fire.
Nutrition (Superfoods): Mostly focus on "preventing disease" (zhì wèi bìng), that is, prevention and support. Long-term adherence to a healthy diet, rich in these nutrient-dense foods, can boost your immunity, reduce inflammation, and lower your future risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, or cancer. This is laying the fire prevention groundwork.

Their fundamental roles are entirely different.

To Summarize

So, it's not that "superfoods" are useless. Rather, their mechanism of action, strength of effect, and level of evidence mean they cannot replace drugs as the "first-line solution" for treating established illnesses.

A wiser perspective is this:

View modern medicine as your health's "guardian angel," providing powerful, precise treatment when you are sick. View "superfoods" and balanced nutrition as the "foundation" of your health, offering daily support and nourishment so you need to call on the "guardian angel" as little as possible.

They are not competitors; they are a perfect partnership. Healthy eating strengthens your body's foundation, potentially allowing medications to work better at lower doses or reducing side effects. But it can never replace the life-saving role of potent drugs in critical moments.