Typically, “functional foods” are those that can provide additional health benefits beyond fulfilling basic nutritional needs.

For example, fatty, cold-water fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines contain omega-3 fats, which can positively impact your health and wellbeing in a number of ways.

Colorful fruits and vegetables like broccoli, berries, and Brussels sprouts are another good example. They contain plenty of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but also other goodies like sulforaphane, anthocyanins, and carotenoids that can reduce the risk of disease, support brain, eye, and heart health, and more.

And even much-maligned foods like beef, pork, and lamb contain a special type of fat, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), that’s associated with a reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes and cancer (and grass-finished/fed meat are particularly rich in CLA).

All this is why food and supplement marketers have seized on these types of foods and molecules and spent who-knows-how-many millions of dollars over the last decades promoting their purported wonders.

For example, several well-known wellness gurus are trying to make sulforaphane out to be the natural cure for cancer, when it’s far from a magic bullet. Omega-3 fats are important, but they can’t bulletproof you against heart disease as some people claim. And while CLA has some health properties, it’s hard to quantify how helpful it really is for the average healthy person.

So, my point is while some foods are more nutritionally “special” than others and deserve consideration in your meal planning, most aren’t as helpful or vital as many self-styled diet experts would have you believe.

And that’s why I wanted to get Kurtis Frank, the director of Research and Development for my supplement company Legion Athletics, onto the show to break down the real science of functional foods.

Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll learn in this episode:

- What a “functional food” is and isn’t
- The best functional foods you can eat
- The most popular foods marketed as “functional” that really aren’t
- And more.

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