Superfoods come and superfoods go. Some are heralded by food bloggers, others are championed by celebrities and others are seen as the trendiest thing in existence. Most though tend to have a short and fleeting life in the public conscience before they gradually fade away, only to be replaced by something else. And so their cyclic lifestyle continues.

However it turns out that could be some scientific value to super foods.

Scientists believe that eating a bowl of whole grain and cereal fibre products – like quinoa and other on-trend superfoods – could reduce the risk of heart disease, respiratory ailments diabetes and other life threatening issues by as much as seventeen percent.

Now that is super!

Led by Dr Lu Qi of the Harvard Public School of Health, a group of researchers poured over the results of previous work conducted by the NIH-AARP (National Institute of Health, American Association of Retired Persons). The diets and health of over 350,000 people were looked at and it appeared that those people who ate 34 grams of whole grain foodstuffs per day were seventeen less likely to die prematurely.

A higher average was associated with a reduction of eleven percent of death from respiratory diseases and an almost fifty percent reduced risk of diabetes.

“Our study indicates that intake of whole grains and cereal fibre may reduce the risk of all-cause mortality and death from chronic diseases.”

“Our findings should motivate future studies, especially clinical trials and experimental studies to further testify the beneficial effects of whole grains and potential effective components such as fibre and other nutrients,” Qi and his fellow researchers concluded.

The study’s full results and deductions – entitled Consumption of whole grains and cereal fiber and total and cause-specific mortality – is set to be published in the journal BMC Medicine.