What Makes A Food Super? Ask Moringa.

The idea of exotic food as silver bullet existed long before raspberry ketones, goji berries or maca root. Yet consumers still fall for these supposedly magical products. Dr Alan Levinovitz investigates how one such superfood came to be.

“MORINGA OLEIFERA. Have you ever heard of that?” Dr Mehmet Oz asked his TV audience in 2012. “Moringa oleifera comes from the Himalayas! And there’s a tree in the northwest part of India, where this grows, that has been used for many, many centuries there, for the very reason that you feel you’re being sapped, which is that you don’t have enough energy.”

Oz and a guest stand behind a table covered in jars and featuring a sign: reenergise your life. He presents her with a cup of moringa tea. It shimmers yellowish green in the glass cup. She sips and grimaces. She doesn’t look reenergised.