We get it, it’s easy to feel like you’re not getting enough high quality food in your diet. With greens powders splashed all over your social media, they seem like a convenient way to close those nutritional gaps. Unfortunately, underneath the huge marketing budgets are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of these products. Here are the five big ones:
1. Nobody can prove that they actually work
Seems like a bit of an oversight for such an expensive group of products, right? Believe it or not, the science behind powdered greens is incredibly thin.
There’s little peer-reviewed scientific evidence showing what these products actually do for human health – so how do these brands work around such an obvious problem? They leverage the star power of their individual ingredients.
As marketing tactics go, it’s actually a pretty effective one. By touting the health benefits of their individual ingredients, these brands are able to side step the absence of rigorous clinical studies on their products’ efficacy.
2. More doesn’t mean better
We’ll admit, “more is better” is a tempting line of reasoning. The makers of powdered greens rely on the intuitive assumption that greater amounts of healthy ingredients packed into one supplement must mean better health results for those who take them.
If only that were true…
Sadly, this is the exact same kind of debunked logic that multivitamin brands relied on for years. Research has shown consistently that different nutrients may end up competing with one another for absorption in the body and delivering little to no actual benefits.
3. Your food is already doing most of the work
Healthcare and nutrition professionals are aligned that a robust supplement routine shouldn’t be a stand in for a balanced diet. Trust us, we know that eating right isn’t always easy, and some targeted supplementation with specific nutrients (like sulforaphane) can optimize your body and help it to become more resilient - but your body is designed to pull nutrients from real food. Without nutrients from whole foods, no supplement routine is going to be effective at keeping you healthy, especially a greens powder so ingredient dense that your body may have a hard time with absorption.
4. There’s some fine print aka hidden filler ingredients
Another reason to rely on your own balanced diet is the control that you have over what you put into your body. Greens powders often contain things like added sugars, corn, soy, starches, and other ingredients that may undercut an otherwise healthy diet. In addition, greens powders often include things like inulin, biotin and other ingredients that are not recommended for long-term consumption and/or are at levels above the FDA daily recommended value.
5. Sulforaphane works better, smarter, faster
All good health and wellness routines are rooted in a balanced diet, but experts in the know agree that the best routines include sulforaphane.
Unlike powdered greens, sulforaphane is scientifically proven to normalize your gut microbiome (feed your gut bacteria) and heal your gut lining (we can do an article on this to link to later), reduce damaging inflammation that causes premature aging and a host of diseases activate the body’s own natural detoxification processes – all in just days.
Ready to ditch your Greens Powders?