Why you CAN’T ‘supercharge’ your smoothie with a powder

HAVE powdered superfoods appeared on your radar yet? Once only available in health food stores, you’ll now find these in most supermarkets.

They can be used in smoothies or sprinkled over your meals to provide all the goodness of a ‘superfood’, without you having to source fresh turmeric root, baobab fruit or wheatgrass plant, and eat it whole.

It sounds tempting, but there’s a certain scepticism among experts about the notion of superfoods in the first place, let alone a powdered form.

As Bahee Van de Bor, a specialist dietitian explains, the term ‘superfood’ is ‘deceptive’.

‘It suggests that a single food is superior to all others and that’s not true,’ she says. ‘We know that for health, long life and disease prevention, we need a combination of vitamins, minerals and micronutrients.’

‘The term “superfood” is more of a marketing myth than a nutritional truth,’ agrees dietitian Linia Patel.

‘It generally refers to a food that is thought to be particularly nutrient dense.’

But what about the idea of getting even more bang for your nutritional buck by condensing a healthy food into powdered form?

DESPITE many of the powders making reference to high levels of vitamins and minerals, that isn’t always a positive. ‘If you’re eating real food, you’re unlikely to “overdose” on any one vitamin or mineral,’ says Bahee Van de Bor.

‘After all, you’d have to eat a whole pile of liver every day to run the risk of overdosing on vitamin A.

‘However, because these powders contain such concentrated amounts, it might be possible, especially if you are taking a number of other supplements, to exceed the recommended amount.

‘For fat soluble vitamins, such as vitamin A, where any excess can’t be excreted, that’s potentially a problem. For example an excess of vitamin A can result in hair loss.’

Another frequent claim is that these powders are rich in antioxidants, substances that can protect cells from damage.

But Nicole Rothband, a specialist dietitian, says some still use the outdated ORAC method of measuring antioxidant capacity. ‘This is a measure of the antioxidant capacity in a test tube not the body and products that claim or even imply potential health benefits from products with high ORAC are contravening European Food Safety Authority regulations.’

Linia Patel concedes that our lifestyles have become faster paced and that often the intensively-farmed food we have access to doesn’t have the same nutrient quality as it might have done in the past, but that doesn’t mean we should be looking for instant fixes. ‘Supplements like these powders may have a role in bridging the gap,’ she says.

‘If you’re having a smoothie anyway, it might make it more nutritious, but it should never be a replacement for a meal.’

EVERY day for the past seven years, Daisy Jones has been painfully reminded of the decision she took as a teenager to have breast implants. It’s a decision she bitterly regrets.

The 29-year-old life coach thinks the implants she had fitted at 19 have ruptured. ‘They’re not symmetrical or the right shape,’ she says.

But far worse are the health problems she believes they have caused. Just three years after she had the surgery, Daisy developed ‘all sorts of pain and strange symptoms of fatigue’.

She says: ‘At first the doctors thought it was diabetes but it wasn’t. I’ve now got a list of things wrong with me — thyroid problems, pains in my breasts, cysts on my ovaries, insomnia, brain fog, you name it. I’ve had to stop working because I can’t concentrate and just don’t have enough energy.

‘I was completely fit as a teenager. I feel there is no other explanation for all these symptoms.’

Before she had the implants, Daisy was self-conscious about her small bust and saved up €4,200 for breast enhancement surgery. ‘I was young and naive and given a hard sell,’ she says. ‘I was told the implants were entirely safe.’

A decade on, it’s not concerns about her figure that keep Daisy up at night. ‘I’ve got a five-year-old boy and I’m very worried about being sick and suffering the effects of something stupid I did when I was 19,’ she says. ‘I want to get them taken out but it’s about €4,000 to get rid of them and all the surrounding tissue, and I haven’t got the funds.’

Her experience is far from unique. Ruptured or leaking breast implants may be potential ‘time bombs’ capable of causing serious illnesses in hundreds of Irish women, according to experts and campaigners.

In December, the medical giant Irish-headquarted Allergan was forced to recall its breast implants after concerns they may be linked to a rare, deadly form of the cancer lymphoma.

THE Allergan products are socalled ‘textured’ implants, designed to stay put better than smooth implants. But it seems something about their rough surface leads to the development of cancer in some women.

Known as breast implant acquired anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL), this is a very serious, but relatively uncommon, problem. The lymphoma is not breast cancer, but a malignancy of the immune system that develops years after the implant surgery, often seven or eight years later.

Removing the implant usually gets rid of the disease. But in some cases, the cancer spread, and women died.

Ireland’s Health Products Regulatory Authority says it has not received any reports of cases here. However, it notes that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority in Britain have estimated that the disease occurs in one woman for every 24,000 implants sold. Indeed, 57 British women have been diagnosed with the condition and three have died.

But there is another, bigger health problem with breast implants. It relates to implants generally — not just Allergan’s — and affects many more women, leaving them with a range of crippling symptoms.

These include rheumatoid arthritis (causing joint pain and disability), painful swelling of the breasts and surrounding areas, scleroderma (an auto-immune condition that causes painful dryness of the mouth and eyes and swelling of the jaw), skin cancer and even, research suggests, an increased risk of stillbirth.

Campaigners say at least 75,000 women worldwide are affected, although the real number is probably many times greater.

The symptoms are all related to the implant rupturing, which happens in most cases, say experts. This is thought to be because the body’s immune system attacks the foreign material in the breast.

The issue is silicone, a form of plastic used for the shells of breast implants whether the filling is saline fluid, soya oil or another material.

Over the past three decades there have been a series of health scares about breast implant-linked symptoms, leading to the withdrawal of at least six types of implant. All have involved problems with silicone.

These included, in the Nineties, the Dow Corning implant (thousands of women claimed the implants had ruptured and caused serious illness involving rheumatoid arthritis-type symptoms) and the Trilucent implant (causing similar problems).

More recently, in 2012, up to 5,000 Irish women were told their PIP implants (that did not even contain medical-grade silicone but a cheaper material more commonly used for mattresses) had been linked to the same kinds of disorder as the other types of silicone.

Cosmetic surgeons acknowledge that breast implants always ‘wear out’. Professor Jim Frame, a senior plastic surgeon, says: ‘Roughly 10% rupture within ten years and 50% rupture within 20 years.’

There have been concerns about health damage caused by silicone breast implants for decades. Although no cause-and-effect relationship has yet been established — and it should be said that many women have implants without experiencing side-effects — doctors are edging closer to understanding how the damage might occur.

Two years ago, Henry Dijkman, a pathologist from Radboud University in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, reported how 17 years of ‘silicone gel bleed’ from breast implants had apparently caused the premature death of a 56-year-old woman. Advanced imaging techniques showed large amounts of the material throughout her organs and the nerve tissue of her body.

Dijkman called this phenomenon Silicone Implant Incompatibility Syndrome. ‘It could interfere with proper functioning of cell systems and the conduction of nerve impulses,’ he said.

The devastating effect this might have on women’s bodies was revealed by recent US research.

A study, published in September, of 100,000 breast implant patients by Mark Clemens, a plastic surgeon at the Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, found that women with breast implants were 4.5 times more likely to have a stillbirth, almost four times more likely to develop melanoma skin cancer and six times more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis.

AND in a bitter twist, some women have had leaking PIP implants removed, only to suffer problems with their replacement Allergan breasts. One woman told us that as a result, she’d had to give up work as a civil servant and put her house on the market.

Elaine — who was ‘too embarrassed’ to give her real name because she feels she has brought all her problems on herself — told us she’d