The Honest List: Top 10 Most Overrated Health Foods
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Before this episode started, David warned you: number ten on this list was going to hurt him. He agreed it belongs there. He still doesn't love it. That's the spirit of what this episode is doing — not telling you that certain foods are bad, but being honest about which ones have been marketed so aggressively as health foods that the gap between perception and reality has become a problem.
David and Dr. Lara Baatenburg built the list together. A few of these, David fell for himself. One he still eats more of than he probably should. All of them are worth understanding.
#1 — Açaí bowls
When David and Dr. Jana were asked to name the most overrated health food without any prompting, they answered at the same time. Açaí bowls.
The açaí berry itself is fine. The problem is what happens to it. A typical açaí bowl comes loaded with almond butter, banana, granola, honey, and whatever else the menu adds to make it taste good — which it absolutely does. It can easily hit 50 to 90 grams of sugar. People eat them for lunch, feeling like they made a virtuous choice. They ate dessert.
If you're bulking or need a high-calorie option, an açaí bowl is genuinely useful. If you're managing your weight and think you're making a clean, nutritious meal, the math doesn't back that up.
#2 — Celery juice
This one has a specific origin story. The celery juice cleanse trend was largely launched by a single person online who calls himself the Medical Medium — a man who, Dr. Lara notes with visible disbelief, claims to receive health advice from spirits. His account has a substantial following. People don't believe their physicians. They believe this.
There is no clinical data supporting celery juice as a therapeutic intervention for gut health or anything else it's credited with. Celery as a whole vegetable is great — lots of fiber, low calorie, useful. Juicing it removes the fiber, which is most of the point of eating it. The weight loss people experience during celery juice cleanses is largely from not eating much. That's not the same as the cleanse working.
#3 — Alkaline water
David went through an alkaline water phase during his early years of weight loss. He'll own it.
The premise behind alkaline water is that disease thrives in an acidic environment, so drinking alkaline water shifts your body toward a more basic state and reduces disease risk. It sounds logical. The problem is that your body's pH is one of the most tightly regulated systems in human physiology. Blood pH stays between 7.35 and 7.45. When it moved meaningfully outside that range, Dr. Lara was dealing with it in the hospital — those patients were seriously ill and difficult to treat.
Drinking alkaline water doesn't move your blood pH. It hits your highly acidic stomach and gets neutralized. You paid extra for marketing.
#4 — Gluten-free products (for people without celiac disease)
If you have celiac disease or a genuine gluten sensitivity, cutting gluten is medically appropriate and makes a real difference. This entry is specifically for the many people who have been convinced by diet culture that gluten-free is healthier for everyone.
It doesn't. To replace gluten's structural role in baked goods, manufacturers typically add more sugar and refined starches. Gluten-free products are often higher in calories than their conventional counterparts. David tells the story of a family friend who went gluten-free on a doctor's recommendation, started buying gluten-free snacks, assuming they were a better choice, and gained 10 to 12 pounds before her doctor explained that gluten-free does not mean calorie-free.
If you feel genuinely better without gluten, don't eat it. But don't assume the gluten-free label is doing nutritional work it isn't doing.
#5 — Coconut oil
Another one David fell for, particularly during his keto phase and the period when he was actively anti-seed oil. Coconut oil was glorified as a cleaner saturated fat, a smarter cooking oil, something categorically different from the alternatives.
It's saturated fat. High in it. It will raise your LDL cholesterol, which the practice has talked about at length in previous episodes. If a recipe calls for coconut oil and you enjoy the result, use it. But using it because you believe it's a healthier option than other fats isn't supported by the evidence. David bought multiple large tubs of coconut oil over the years and used very little of it.
#6 — Granola
Dr. Lara loves granola and would eat it daily if she let herself. She also describes it accurately: it's a broken-down cookie.
Oats have genuine nutritional value. Nuts and seeds add something useful. But to make granola taste the way granola tastes and have the texture people expect, you add significant amounts of sugar and fat. It becomes extremely calorically dense. A small amount of yogurt, eaten occasionally by someone not actively managing their weight, is perfectly fine. Treating it as a health food that you eat in meaningful quantities is a different calculation.
#7 — Kombucha
David does not think kombucha tastes good. His description: used clothing in a bottle of water. Dr. Lara disagrees on taste, at least for certain brands, including one local spot that apparently brews theirs with specific sound tones during fermentation.
The probiotic and prebiotic benefits of kombucha are real but modest. What's also real is the sugar content — kombucha requires sugar to ferment, and depending on the brand and how far along fermentation runs, what's left in the bottle can be significant. It's not a meaningful health intervention, and it's not a substitute for other probiotic sources.
#8 — Plant-based meats
This one surprises people because the marketing around plant-based meats leans heavily on health claims. The reality: Impossible Burgers and their equivalents are highly processed foods with high sodium content, high fat content, and protein that is substantially less bioavailable than animal protein. Manufacturers have to add emulsifiers and various other ingredients to approximate the texture and flavor of meat, and the result is a product that is not nutritionally superior to a lean ground beef burger — and in several ways, meaningfully inferior.
David makes the market case too: Impossible Foods stock has collapsed. The people who care about their health looked at the ingredient list and moved on. The people who don't care about their health just eat a regular burger. There wasn't a market that it actually served well.
#9 — Fruit smoothies
A drug rep brought Tropical Smoothie Cafe to the office the day before this episode was recorded. The cups are enormous. Dr. Lara could not estimate how much sugar was in them, but her best guess is: a lot.
Whole fruit is excellent. Blending fruit into liquid concentrates the sugar, removes much of the satiety signal that comes from chewing and digesting whole food, and often adds far more than a single serving of fruit would provide. A smoothie made at home with a controlled amount of fruit, plus protein and fiber sources, is a different product from what most commercial smoothie chains sell. Those are liquid calories, and they add up fast.
Dr. Lara's rule: eat the fruit. If you're going to make a smoothie, at least you're getting some fiber. Don't replace whole fruit with juice.
#10 — Protein bars
David put this one on the list himself. He also admitted he still eats too many of them and that the farts are an issue.
Protein bars have a place. A single bar mid-afternoon, when lunch runs short, and you need to get through a meeting, is a reasonable tool. What they're not is a meal, despite being marketed as one. They're calorically dense, high in sugar alcohols that cause GI distress at volume, and don't produce the same satiety as whole food sources of protein. David went through a phase of eating two Quest bars and a Premier Protein shake as lunch. He'd be hungry again within the hour.
Dr. Lara's suggested reframe: think of it as a dessert. You don't eat three cookies for lunch. You shouldn't eat three protein bars for lunch either.
What actually holds up
The consistent principle underneath all ten of these entries is the same one that holds up across every episode: whole foods, variety, and skepticism toward health claims on packaging. If a product is advertising itself as a superfood, tune out what comes next. The word superfood is a marketing construct. It doesn't correspond to a real nutritional category, it doesn't mean the product will do what it implies, and it's applied so broadly that it's functionally meaningless.
Eating well doesn't require special products, cleanses, or health-branded foods. It requires eating mostly whole foods, mostly consistently, without needing the thing on your plate to have a brand story attached to it.
Vitals & Values is the podcast of Concierge Medicine of West Michigan, hosted by Dr. David Roden and Dr. Lara Baatenburg. New episodes available wherever you listen.
