Greens Powder, 60 servings

Description

Seventy five ingredients, 60 servings, and the weight of every single ingredient printed on the listing instead of pooled into a blend total. That last point is the entire reason this greens powder exists. It tastes green and we are not going to apologise for that, but a greens powder that refuses to publish its per ingredient amounts is asking you to pay for a list rather than for a composition.

What is in the tub

The arithmetic that makes a greens powder worth reading

Take a tub advertising 75 ingredients in an 8 gram scoop. Divided evenly that is about 107 milligrams of each, which is a trace of most things. In practice the distribution is nothing like even: one or two cheap bulk ingredients make up most of the scoop and the exotic names at the end of the list are present in milligram quantities.

Nobody can tell which, because a blend total hides it by design. That is the subject of what a blend is legally allowed to leave out, and it is why we publish the descending weight list for this product rather than a count of ingredients.

Why the ingredient count is the wrong thing to shop on

Seventy five is a marketing number. Twelve ingredients at a gram each would be a more concentrated product than seventy five at a hundred milligrams, and both would print a similar total on the front of the tub. Read the top five lines of the weight list and you know most of what there is to know about any greens powder.

The single ingredient powders on the greens and wholefood page exist for people who reach that conclusion and would rather buy spirulina, beet and wheatgrass separately by the gram. That is usually cheaper and always clearer.

What a greens powder is not a substitute for

Vegetables. A scoop weighs 8 grams and a portion of broccoli weighs eighty, so the fibre, the water and the volume are not comparable quantities, and no amount of ingredient counting changes that. The accurate description of a greens powder is a concentrated supplement of plant derived compounds.

We print that on a page that sells the product because the alternative is implying something else. If you want the nutrients a greens powder is bought for, the cheapest route is the vegetable aisle and the second cheapest is single ingredient powders bought by the gram.

Heavy metals, the real testing question

Algae and leafy crops take up what is in their water and soil and concentrate it, and a product combining dozens of them combines dozens of exposure routes. Every lot therefore goes to an outside laboratory for lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury, and the results are published with the listing rather than summarised as tested.

What the research on these ingredients covers

Most of the literature is compositional: analyses of vitamin, mineral, chlorophyll and polyphenol content in individual plants. The human trials that exist are small, use single ingredients at defined doses, and rarely study a combination product at all. So there is no published dose for a greens powder as a category. That describes the state of the evidence and is not a claim about this tub.

What it tastes like

Green, in the strongest sense of the word. There is no sweetener and no flavouring, which keeps the weight list honest and makes the first glass a surprise. It mixes better into juice than water, and the spirulina and chlorella in it will stain a plastic shaker.

Testing and where it sits

Identity and contaminant testing on every lot by a laboratory with no ownership tie to this company, with under specification lots withdrawn and the failing certificates left published. Intake references for the individual nutrients are on the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements fact sheet library, and this tub is listed on the herbals page with its full ingredient breakdown.