Every few years a food that has been eaten without comment for centuries is repositioned as a health product. The trigger is rarely a discovery about the food itself.
Old foods carry no regulatory burden
A food with a long history of consumption faces a far lighter approval path than a newly engineered ingredient, which must demonstrate safety before it can be sold.
That makes traditional foods attractive to companies looking for something to sell quickly, since the product can reach shelves while a novel ingredient is still in review.
The marketing then has to explain why this familiar thing deserves a premium, and a health framing is the most available answer.
Tradition substitutes for evidence in the story
Claims about traditional foods lean heavily on longevity of use, which is presented as a form of proof that centuries of eating something establishes its benefits.
Long use does tell us a food is unlikely to be acutely harmful, which is genuinely useful information, but it says very little about the specific effects being advertised.
The rhetorical move is to let the reader supply the missing step, so the claim is implied strongly while remaining vague enough to stay defensible.
A single compound stands in for the whole food
Most rediscoveries centre on one compound the food contains, isolated in a laboratory context and described in terms of what it does under those conditions.
The quantity present in a normal serving is often far below what was studied, and the compound may behave differently inside a whole food than in isolation.
Naming the compound gives the claim a scientific texture without requiring evidence that eating the food produces the effect, which is a different and much harder question.
Price rises where the food was cheap
Repositioning changes who buys the food and what they will pay, and prices in the originating markets frequently follow upward.
For producers that can be welcome, though the benefit often accrues to exporters and processors rather than to the households that grew the food for their own use.
Where the food was a staple for people on low incomes, the price shift has consequences that the wellness framing does not acknowledge.
The useful reading is culinary
These foods are usually worth eating, but for the reasons they were always worth eating: they taste of something, they keep well, and they do a job in a dish.
Approaching them as ingredients rather than as remedies produces better cooking and sets expectations that the food can actually meet.
Anyone with a specific health concern is better served by a professional than by a label, since the questions involved are individual rather than general.