Introduction
Superfoods are an increasingly significant category of health foods that are celebrated for their supposed extraordinary nutritional and/or medicinal properties, their histories of traditional use by ancient or indigenous communities, and their “natural” and “authentic” qualities (Loyer 2016). There is no standard definition of the term “superfood”; it is not a legal or regulatory category such as “organic” or “fair trade,” nor is it used by scholarly convention as is the term “functional food” (Lunn 2006). It can be considered a subcategory of the latter because superfoods are marketed for their health benefits and are referred to in the marketing literature as “naturally functional” (Mellentin 2014). The term appears prominently on product packaging, in marketing, and in the media, where tentative scientific findings regarding a food’s healthfulness, often funded by economically interested parties, are...
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Loyer, J. (2016). Superfoods. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_574-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_574-1
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