You’ve seen them. A celebrity swears by them, a film star puts them in every smoothie, and suddenly everyone is talking about goji berries, acai and whatever the next “superfood” turns out to be.
There’s a picture in people’s heads of where they come from: a rainforest, a remote mountain, a secret known only to the people who live there. In reality, you buy them in a health shop or a specialist store, dried, powdered or in a packet, and you pay a premium for the story.
Let’s talk about the price. At the time of writing, a 210g bag of dried goji berries at Holland & Barrett was £6.89, and a small tub of acai powder blended with other berries was £24.99 for 100g. Even the plain acai powders I found ran at roughly £14 to £20 per 100g. For that money you could buy a lot of ordinary organic fruit and vegetables.
So do they work? Do they rejuvenate you?
Not in the way the marketing suggests. These are real foods with real nutrients. Goji berries contain fibre and carotenoids, and acai contains anthocyanins. Some small studies on goji show modest effects on things like cholesterol and blood sugar. But those studies are small, and the researchers themselves say more work is needed. I could not find any research showing that these berries make you look younger, reverse ageing or prevent disease. The big claims come from the packaging, not the science.
And a small detail the packet won’t tell you: dried goji berries are more than half sugar by weight. They are a concentrated snack, not a free pass.
So I’ll ask the question I ask my clients. Wouldn’t it make more sense to improve your everyday diet, a little at a time? Add a vegetable you don’t usually eat. Swap one processed snack for fruit. Eat what’s in season. Cook something from scratch. It is not rocket science. A little common sense, repeated every day, will do far more for your health and your ageing than any expensive powder in a pouch.
If a berry you enjoy fits your budget, enjoy it. Just don’t expect it to do the work your whole diet should be doing.
Prevention rather than cure.
Milvia Pili
Functional Nutritional Therapist
