The Best Superfoods to Help You Lose Weight According to Science

The term ‘superfood’ is familiar to most people, but it’s a term that gets thrown around by people trying to sell you a product, without any particular knowledge of its real meaning. It’s become a term that marketing departments use to indicate how healthy their product is, without any real regard for whether or not it’s actually true.

In order to combat this and learn how to include superfoods in your diet responsibly, we need to understand what a superfood actually is.

The Dictionary definition of superfoods states that they are “A nutrient-rich food considered to be especially beneficial for health and well-being” (normally through being nutritionally dense), but there are often other meanings attached to the term. If a food or drink is said to have some form of beneficial impact on a person’s health beyond its nutrition, then it can get classed as a “superfood” as well.

Nutritionally dense foods are the types of superfoods that you should be paying attention to and tend to contain nutrients such as antioxidants, healthy fats, fibre and phytochemicals. All of these are known to have an impact on health conditions ranging from heart disease to diabetes, and are an essential part of any healthy diet.

Superfoods are not a silver bullet. No matter what you read online, superfoods do not immediately solve any health issue you might have, and this is true of weight loss as much as anything else. The brutal truth about losing weight is that it all boils down to a basic calculation:

Calories Out > Calories in

Unless you’re burning more calories than you’re consuming, you won’t lose weight, and if you’re eating too many calories worth of superfoods, the reality is you’ll still gain weight or keep it on as though you were eating the same number of calories in the form of pizza.

If we focus on superfoods as just being densely packed with nutrients, then there’s plenty of evidence that superfoods work, but just as many false sources pretending that they do things that they can’t. Harvard University advises that superfoods can be a healthy part of your diet, but they are like any food, in that if you don’t eat a healthy diet as a whole, then the benefits you’ll get will be considerably less.

With all that said, there are a number of superfoods that can be very helpful when it comes to weight loss. What you want to aim for are foods that are high in soluble fibre which has been shown to have an impact on your health and metabolism.

An in-depth list of foods high in soluble fibre can be found here, but some of the items that are often classed as superfoods that are also high in soluble fibre include:

• Avocado
• Sweet Potato
• Broccoli
• Apricots
• Flax Seeds
• Hazelnuts
• Barley

The above is not a comprehensive list of superfoods that are good for losing weight. You’ll find online claims that drinks such as green tea can help you lose weight by boosting your metabolism. This is backed up by science, but like all claims around superfoods, you need to be aware of the effect it’s actually going to have, and how you should be using it – otherwise you could just be wasting money.

Conclusion:

Superfoods can be a beneficial part of your diet if you’re looking to lose weight. Certain foods which are high in soluble fibre are what you need to look for, so make sure you’re doing the research on what foods are going to help you, rather than just assuming that every superfood does the same thing.

About the Author – Agata Rosinska

Agata joined Healthy Supplies back in 2014, and used her expertise gained from a degree in Food Engineering with a specialisation in nutrition to quickly advance through the ranks and become the person responsible for ensuring that all our products meet the health and nutritional needs of our customers. In 2016 she became one of the Directors of the company, and has continued to use her expertise in nutrition to guide the development of the business and provide healthy recipes that our customers can follow to help them live a healthy lifestyle.