Green superfood powder drinks are on the rise.
People are consuming green drinks to lose weight, increase energy, boost mood and improve the immune system.
It’s no secret that eating vegetables is a simple and easy way to achieve all four of those goals and more. But eating 10+ vegetable servings per day is tough, especially for on-the-go lifestyles.
That’s where green powders come in. Think: nutritional insurance.
Rankings
1. Organifi Green Juice
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Note: we reached out to Organifi and they were nice enough to hook us up with an exclusive coupon for our readers: use coupon code BN15 at checkout to get an additional 15% off your total purchase.
Organifi Green Juice is one of the best tasting, most power-packed green juices on the market today. It’s designed to get you all the vital greens your body needs to thrive in one easy to drink powder.
It has a fantastic base of superfood ingredients like Ashwagandha, for stress, and coconut water to help with the transmission of the other nutrients through your body.
But they don’t stop there. Its one-of-a-kind formula includes beets, chlorella, spirulina, matcha green tea, turmeric and more.
Their ingredients list reads like a who’s who list of superfoods.
It’s backed by 3rd party research that has shown it to be extremely effective at helping people lose weight, reduce their cholesterol, and increase their quality of life. It’s an amazing choice no matter who you are, and that’s why it’s our number one choice for 2021.
2. LiveWell Beyond Greens
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Beyond Greens by LiveWell is one of the most superfood dense green powders on the market that is actual enjoyable – thanks to its light matcha flavor and non-clumping powder.
Containing 4 varieties of mushrooms alongside probiotics, this greens powder is one of the most powerful nutritional insurance policy supplements available.
3. Detox Organics Chocolate Superfoods
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Detox Organics makes the best green juice for most people because its stacked hard-core with the most potent and energy-infused ingredients.
Stuff like beetroot and acai.
The premium stuff.
There is probably not a better morning ritual than slamming one of these to start your day. It also has what you’d expect in a premium greens drink blend — Spirulina, wheatgrass, and kale.
Tip: try this stuff with milk. It adds a little more protein and transforms to a delicious chocolate shake and you can hardly tell you’re guzzling down a bunch of greens.
4. Ladder Superfood Greens
Ladder superfood greens provides a mix of some of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet, including spirulina, spinach and beet root extract. It also contains 3000 IU of vitamin D and 400mg of magnesium per serving to further enhance your body.
No fillers, colors or artificial sweeteners included here, making it one of the purest greens powders on the market.
5. Athletic Greens
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Athletic Greens is loaded with good ingredients and it’s surprisingly tasty too (kind of a minty taste). The ingredient lineup is extensive (over 70 ingredients) and ultra-clean (no chemicals, artificial flavors, GMO’s, wheat, dairy or animal products).
Full of superfoods like blueberries, spirulina, the drink also is a probiotic, digestive enzyme and multivitamin.
One of the better choices.
6. Garden of Life Raw Organic Perfect Food
“Perfect” might be a stretch, but Garden of Life’s green drink is pretty darn good. Garden of Life is known for providing vitamin and mineral supplements that use superfood extracts as a base, so green drinks are definitely home turf for them. With their Perfect Food supplement, the company flexes its superfood muscle: name a superfood, and it’s probably in this blend.
Tart cherry, chia seed sprouts, ginger, garlic, spinach extract – it’s got them all. The blend is a little weak on the fiber and protein side of things, but that’s not the purpose of the powder, in this case.
7. Amazing Grass Green Superfood The Original
Amazing Grass has several popular variants of green drink superfoods, but the original is still the best. The green grass blend includes wheat grass, barley, spinach, spirulina, alfalfa, and broccoli, among others; these total almost six grams per serving.
The antioxidant blend is a little weaker, with some strong antioxidants like acerola cherry, acai berry, and green tea extract, but it doesn’t contain the same high-powered fruit and vegetable combo as some of the other green drinks out there.
8. Nested Super Greens
Nested Greens is strong in the vegetable department, a bit lacking when it comes to fruits, but is definitely a category leader when it comes to probiotic content.
You’ve got your typical green ingredients, but one thing this supplement features that many others do not is a blend of six different probiotic bacteria cultures to jump-start your gastrointestinal health. Monk fruit extract acts as a natural sweetener, and a fiber blend helps keep the dietary fiber content respectable.
9. Peak Performance Delicious Green Superfood
From the title alone, you can tell that Peak Performance is trying to fight one of the biggest stereotypes about green drinks: they don’t taste very good.
Their green drink powder is strong across all ingredient categories; it’s got the greens you’d expect to see, like kale, spinach, spirulina, and wheatgrass, alongside anti-inflammatories like blueberry, green tea, grape skin, and turmeric.
10. Orgain Organic Superfoods
Orgain delivers a very solid vegetable-heavy product that supplies a hefty serving of fiber, too. With plenty of green grasses and sprouts, you’ll definitely get your green vegetable micronutrients, and on top of that, there are seven grams of fiber per serving (your recommended daily intake is 25-30 grams).
Orgain is a little weak on the fruit and berry side of things, and it does incorporate several natural flavorings, so if you’re not a fan of those, it might impact your choice. Orgain includes a probiotic, Bacillus subtilis, but it seems more of an afterthought than anything else.
11. Parker Naturals Berry SuperFood
Parker Naturals sells a popular green food drink, but when you analyze the ingredients, it’s pretty mediocre. There aren’t that many different ingredients, which means it’s exposing your body to a less extensive range of fruits and vegetables.
In addition, the superfoods that are chosen aren’t always the cream of the crop. It’s got natural flavorings in it, and is sweetened with monk fruit extract, a natural non-caloric sweetener. These are also drawbacks if you have strict purity requirements from your green drink product.
12. Hawaiian Spirulina Green Complete
Hawaiian Spirulina dubs itself “complete,” but one glance at the ingredients tells you it’s far from it. Really this is more of a spirulina supplement, with a few other greens thrown in for good measure.
The number of green ingredients and fruits and berries is pretty small, and though it includes a probiotic, it’s not a well-studied one that’s been associated with good gut health.
Category winners
Best green drink overall: Organifi Green Juice
Organifi’s combination of superfood fruit and vegetable extracts and herbal extracts from ashwagandha, beets, and turmeric makes for an incredibly versatile green drink for boosting your body’s metabolism, increasing antioxidant levels, and improving metabolic health. It’s definitely the best all-around green drink available.
Best green drink for athletes: Athletic Greens
Athletic Greens pulls off an amazing feat: it provides a wide range of ingredients without loading up on additives that athletes don’t need, like excessive sugar. It’s an excellent choice for recovery after a tough workout, thanks to ample doses of antioxidants plus essential vitamins and minerals.
Best green drink for women: Detox Organics Chocolate Superfoods
Detox Organics is great for women looking to swap out sugary, unhealthy drinks and snacks for something with powerful antioxidants that tastes great, too. It’s loaded with herbal extracts, antioxidants, and energy boosters, and only two grams of sugar.
Best green drink for boosting immune function: Athletic Greens
To amp up your immune function, you want a green drink that delivers top of the line antioxidants. That’s why we chose Athletic Greens: it features over 70 different superfoods, including extracts from some of the most powerful antioxidants out there—like chlorella, lycium berry, and acerola, to name just a few.
Best green drink for more energy: Ladder Greens
Ladder Greens features a potent combo of caffeinated green tea extract, theanine, beanie, and citicoline. These ingredients work together to boost your physical and mental energy reserves, all with only 25 calories—so no sugar crash to worry about.
Best green drink for gut health: LiveWell Beyond Greens
To improve gut health, you want your green superfood drink to supply two things in addition to the usual antioxidants: probiotic bacteria and prebiotic nutrients for these bacteria to flourish. LiveWell Beyond Greens provides both in droves, making it a great choice for improving gut health.
Who should buy a green drink?
Do you get five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables every day? If so, congratulations—you’re meeting the federal recommendations for optimal fruit and vegetable intake.
If not, you’re part of the nine out of ten people who don’t meet those guidelines. What are the consequences? According to scientific research by leading nutritionists, the consequences are lower levels of antioxidants in your body, lower quality of life, and a greater risk for chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
However, if you can’t meet daily recommendations with whole fruits and vegetables, a green drink might be able to help. Green drinks contain powdered and concentrated extracts from whole fruits and vegetables, and are largely a response to research on individual vitamin or mineral supplements that had disappointing results.
A green drink provides all the vitamins and minerals that you get in real fruits and vegetables, alongside the other phytonutrients that accompany them.
For this reason, many people believe that green drinks provide nutrients and particularly antioxidants in a more bioavailable manner. If you want to reduce systemic inflammation, improve the functioning of your immune system, and increase your cognitive performance, a green drink is a great solution for you.
They are great for people who travel a lot, or who are often too busy for a healthy meal with a lot of fruits and vegetables for breakfast or lunch. Many green drinks come in powder form, which makes them super easy to travel with and mix into protein shakes, smoothies, or even just plain water.
How we ranked
Our green drink rankings represent the best brands on the market right now. To formulate our rankings, we reviewed all the products on the market that met our inclusion criteria.
We perused other green juice rankings and reviews out there (like Nutritional Diversity) to get some starting points.
Namely, to be considered, a product had to contain multiple different concentrates, powders, or extracts from fruits and vegetables. Single ingredient formulations, like spirulina or chlorella, didn’t qualify for the rankings. We also mandated that the product be powder-based—liquid green drinks like V8 Healthy Greens did not qualify.
This is because one of the biggest advantages of green drinks is their portability and the ability to mix powder into a shake, smoothie, juice, or water. A liquid green drink has a more limited shelf life, a lot more bulk, and generate more plastic waste since you have to toss out a bottle every time you have a serving.
If a green drink powder included flavoring agents, we made sure they were all-natural and sugar-free. Anything that used synthetic flavoring agents or sweeteners, plus anything with added sugar, got cut.
While it’s true that sugar is present naturally in fruit, it’s tied up with substantial amounts of fiber that block its absorption. When consuming a drink, like a green drink (or regular fruit juice, for that matter), any sugar that’s present will be rapidly absorbed, causing problems for your body’s metabolic health and insulin response. We also dropped anything with added caffeine, like Amazing Grass Energy, since the high caffeine content can cause some adverse reactions, and these green drinks are less convenient because they can’t be used at night.
Next, we evaluated the breadth and depth of the ingredients. Green drink powders that had more ingredients, and higher-quality sources were rated highly, while those products that didn’t have as much variety, or used lower-quality sources, ended up getting dropped.
We evaluated the quality of the fruit and vegetable sources via markers of quality like non-GMO certifications, organic farming practices, and the use of rapid freeze-drying and powderizing, rather than concentrates or extracts. Powders that are generated by removing water via freeze drying have a greater balance of the micronutrients that you’d get in the original, raw fruit or vegetable.
After that, we took a closer look at which fruits and vegetables were included. We had a short list of superfood ingredients that earned a green drink a higher place in the rankings.
These include berries with high levels of antioxidants, like black cherries, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. It’s not that other fruits like apples or pears are bad; they just don’t have quite the nutritional punch as a superfood.
We had similar superfood lists for vegetables, which included veggies like kale, carrots, broccoli, spirulina, garlic, ginger, and chia seeds. Again, we didn’t penalize a green drink for including vegetables that weren’t on this list, but the more that were included, the better.
Finally, we checked to see if each green drink included any useful additional ingredients, like enzymes, probiotics, or prebiotic ingredients to help your gut bacteria flourish. While these clearly won’t be the focus of any green drink powder, they are nevertheless factors that help distinguish the good from the great products.
After applying all of these ranking criteria, we were left with the ten best green drinks of the year.
Benefits
Green foods are full of phytonutrients. Green foods are more than the classic calories, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
They’re packed with carotenoids, antioxidants, amino acids, fiber, enzymes, vitamins and minerals.
These nutrients that fall outside the box of most bioscience or online advice are known to researchers as phytonutrients. As a whole, these phytonutrients have no recommended daily values- some haven’t even been isolated and discovered yet.
But research shows that phytonutrients actually decrease diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and certain autoimmune conditions (1).
It’s the rainbow effect, where all the different chemicals in green foods actually work together much more effectively than they do in isolation.
Green drinks can help increase your energy. All over the world men and women are complaining that they have no energy, feel exhausted, and have no clue what to do. Many doctors are stumped, too.
Luckily, green foods pack in micronutrients in a way that is easily absorbed by the body to correct this issue according to the Journal of International Medical Research (2).
Researchers discovered that because of the typical American diet, low in plant-based foods, many men and women are low in micronutrients (3).
We may only need trace amounts of these nutrients, but they’re necessary for top-notch health and energy.
If you get over 10 veggies a Day you don’t need a green powder. Green foods are convenient because you can mix them with water or take them in a capsule to ensure you get in enough greens.
There are some out there that don’t need green foods. If you already eat 10 or more servings of vegetables a day you don’t need to take are green food supplement on top of that (4).
The main idea is that once you hit 10 vegetables (and other superfoods) a day it’s redundant to add in a green powder supplement. You’ve already got your veggies covered and that money can be better spent on different supplements to complement your diet.
Green foods are famously low in calories because they don’t have much fat, protein, or carbohydrates. That’s part of the reason we love them. However, in the world of nutrition, there are two types of nutrients: Water-soluble nutrients and fat-soluble nutrients.
Green foods actually have both, although they don’t have much fat. This means you can miss out on vitamins A, E, and K if you don’t consume your green powders with a fat or you should take formulations that have bipolar, or amphipathic, compounds (5). These compounds bind to water AND fat to boost absorption of fat-soluble nutrients.
It’s a win-win.
So, when you’re shopping around for a green powder look on the label for lecithin or phosphatidylcholine. These are two popular common bipolar compounds you’re likely to find in green powder blends (6).
The other option is to take your green powders with a teaspoon of coconut oil to boost absorption as well (7).
Chlorella In Green Powders Boosts Immune Function. Chlorella, a common addition to green powders, is best known as a detoxifier.
Basically, because it’s tiny and has a high surface area it can cling onto heavy metals and other impurities moving around your body. The most common way chlorella is taken for this effect is over time, not to remove all heavy metals in the body at once, but do so bit by bit over time.
Research on mice being fed lead showed that this piecemeal approach helped to prevent lead poisoning (8).
As for human research, we can’t just feed people lead and chlorella and see what happens. For some reason that’s generally frowned upon.
But supplementing with chlorella has been seen to enhance the immune system in patients in as few as 8 weeks of supplementing (9). Even though the detoxification benefits of chlorella are seen in mice so far, the immune function benefits in humans are real and significant.
Spirulina In Green Powders Increases Satiety. Spirulina is similar to chlorella but packs much more protein.
In fact, spirulina is 60% protein by weight making it the most protein-packed food on the face of the Earth (10).
Research has shown that similar to chlorella, spirulina can assist in heavy metal detoxification (11). But again, those benefits are only tested in mice.
Luckily, when people eat spirulina they do see fat loss results (12). It seems that spirulina works to increase satiety from its high protein content and its impressive nutritional profile making it a great snack or morning boost.
Kelp in green powders boosts metabolism. Kelp is another common green addition to green powders, best known as a natural source of iodine.
Typically, if you don’t regularly eat seafood you’re missing out on iodine. While you can cook with iodine-enriched salts, those tend to quickly lose iodine during the cooking process (13). To add in a bioavailable source of iodine to keep your metabolism on track and keep your thyroid running in tip-top shape kelp is your go to, which is why its found in thyroid supplements. One recent Russian study gave a kelp extract to patients and saw a significant 10-pound reduction in fat over 12 weeks because the kelp seemed to increase their resting metabolic rate (14).
Barley grass in green powders lowers cholesterol. Barley grass is another popular green food component and is most popular for lowering your cholesterol by improving fat metabolism (15).
Regularly consuming barley grass in a green foods supplement ends up offering protection against heart disease through two mechanisms. First, with your total cholesterol lowered you’re less likely to have your cholesterol oxidized, get all sticky, and form plaque.
Second, barley grass is a potent antioxidant, meaning that it can help prevent or repair oxidative stress before cholesterol forms plaques in your body in the first place.
Not to mention that antioxidants are associated with younger, softer wrinkle-free skin so you end up looking better AND living longer (16)!
Wheatgrass is rich in chlorophyll
While many claims about wheatgrass may be exaggerated due to its popularity, there is some merit to using a green food supplement containing wheatgrass (17). The main benefit is that wheatgrass is high in chlorophyll, the chemical that makes plants green.
One big benefit from consuming chlorophyll, amongst many, are that it helps to suppress appetite. One study showed that chlorophyll amplified feelings of satiety to cut down on overeating for 20 obese women (18).
Additionally, chlorophyll is seen to boost recovery from injury from infection to keep your immune system going strong and dramatically cut down on sick days (19).
Alfalfa in green powders can help heal your digestive tract. Alfalfa, the grass not the Little Rascal, is an excellent addition to a green powder supplement.
Not only is alfalfa a nutritional powerhouse just as wheatgrass, spirulina, and chlorella, but also alfalfa has been used successfully to treat upset stomachs anecdotally.
Alfalfa is seen to increase the number of digestive enzymes we pump out to improve digestion of our food (20). This in combination with the unique blend of phytonutrients, antioxidants, and vitamin C in alfalfa sheds some light on more of the anti-aging and longevity benefits from regularly consuming alfalfa.
Green powders are super convenient to take. One of the biggest benefits of consuming a green powder is that it’s simple.
If you had to choose between drinking a glass of water or chowing down on 10 vegetables, which would you pick?
Having a green powder makes it simple to significantly increase your nutrient intake without all the cooking, planning, and prep typically involved making it a simple and easy way to go if you’re looking to lose weight, build muscle, and amplify your energy.
Plant based diets that include green drinks might help with lean body mass. While alkaline diets are hyped up, the plant-based foods they promote do have a few benefits such as increasing magnesium, improving potassium levels, and increasing growth hormone (23).
One study showed that patients with chronic lower back pain fed an alkalizing diet saw less lower back pain after 4 weeks (24).
The best is that green powders can help you maintain or even build more lean body mass. One study looked specifically at muscle wasting and showed that simply increasing potassium intake in over 363 men and women resulted in significantly more lean body mass compared to the placebo group taking a sugar pill (25).
Green drinks can’t totally replace real vegetables. While green powders are convenient and packed with health benefits, they are still not the real deal.
Even with the best ingredients, green powders are processed causing a loss in water, fiber, and nutrients pulling out some of the benefits found in vegetable consumption.
For example, vegetables can work synergistically to boost antioxidant activity in their whole unprocessed form but these same benefits are not seen in green food powders (26).
Green powders are ideal for fat loss. A new study came out linking vegetable consumption with fat loss (27). The key here is that by providing micronutrients and other often overlooked nutrients feeds the body on a cellular level to provide satiety and fight cravings.
The result? Simple and effective fat loss.
Green powders are not a meal replacement. Green powders are not meal replacement shakes. These supplements may pack a nutritional wallop, but they are super low in calories. This makes it simple to develop poor eating habits by using green powders to replace solid foods in the hope of radical fat loss.
While green powders can help jump start your morning or pick you up in the afternoon it is still key to consume enough calories, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats to encourage maintenance, growth, and repair. Otherwise, your immune system, muscle recovery, and organ systems won’t be functioning optimally.
Lower quality green powders may not have the promised amount of vegetables. Another pitfall of green food supplements is the number of ingredients.
While it may seem amazing to offer a variety of green, some labels boasting dozens of vegetables, this may be misleading.
While companies have to report what goes into their formulations, they don’t have to post how much goes into their formulations. The rule is that the ingredients are listed in order of amount used. Now, with numerous ingredients, companies can use small amounts to say they use an ingredient BUT it may not be enough to make a difference in your health.
This one is tough to figure out for yourself because you’ll have to do your research into whichever green food supplement you select. For the most part, using a brand with many testimonials that show results is your best bet.
Herbal extracts in green drinks might have side effects. There seem to be more and more green food supplements these days adding in herbal ingredients to their formulations.
Now, I love herbal extracts but just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it is safe. Many herbs out there can help with weight loss and improving your health but can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
The issue is that many men and women don’t consider herbal extracts as medicine they take even though it can interfere with other medications they are prescribed. This can lead to further health complications and may even kill you.
Green powders can help your gut bacteria. Another trend in green powder supplements is to include probiotics.
Having them in a green powder basically kills two birds with one stone. By adding in probiotics you fuel the “good” gut bacteria you have that has long-reaching health effects from making you feel happier, increasing satiety, and boosting your immune system (29).
Along with probiotics, green food powders come with prebiotics too. Essentially, prebiotics are the food that probiotic bacteria eat. It makes sense that you want your probiotics to eat the best and stay the healthiest to make them even stronger and more productive in your gut, right?
In your gut the same story is playing out. Without prebiotics to feed your “good” bacteria, the “bad” bacteria can start growing stronger and overpowering that “good” bacteria.
Don’t worry though, if your green powder doesn’t have prebiotics then make sure you get enough, around 35 grams, of fiber a day. That’s what your good bacteria thrives on.
ORAC antioxidant scores of green powders may be misleading. A big advertising promise of many green foods companies is the ORAC score, or the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. Basically, this is a number to express how well a nutrient can fight oxidative stress. The same type of stress that causes wrinkles, aging, inflammation, and disease (32).
The issue here is that ORAC may not be the best measure for antioxidants and you may be misled by companies using their green supplements ORAC scores to persuade you to buy.
The issue is that ORAC scores are calculated in vitro or in a test tube environment.
Since the body is much much more complex ORAC scores in the test tube might not represent what actually happens once a green powder goes down the hatch.
A great example of this is the Vitamin E Paradox. The paradox is that vitamin E is actually a strong antioxidant BUT it has a surprisingly low ORAC score (33). The bottom line is that while science and research do the best they can, they can’t predict exactly how a supplement is going to work in your body.
Again, it’s for the best to actually try out or get feedback from real people to discover what brands actually work.
Too much of a green drink might inhibit recovery from tough workouts. Antioxidants are a double-edged sword in the world of recovery and muscle growth.
If you take antioxidants too quickly after a workout, you can actually blunt the oxidation and inflammation that follows. That may sound ideal, but your body needs that oxidative stress to signal that you need to come back stronger, faster, and more enduring than before.
On the other hand, if you’re sore the next day after a workout then sipping on green powders will provide many of the essential antioxidants and nutrients you need to support immune function to overcompensate and build larger muscles to come back stronger next workout.
Side effects
Since green drink powders are derived from natural fruits and vegetables, the probability of side effects is quite low, especially when taken at the recommended dosage. A 2011 review study that analyzed 21 different scientific studies that used green superfood drinks noted that none of the participants in these studies reported any serious adverse effects (35).
One thing you should be conscious if you have food allergies is lengthy ingredient lists—while they are uncommon, some people do have allergies to specific types of fruits or vegetables, such as mangoes or kiwi fruit. If you have these allergies, you should check the ingredients list to see if any of the fruits or vegetables you know you are allergic to are present. If so, you’ll want to opt for a different product.
Recommended dosage
It’s hard to calibrate dosage with a green drink, but your goal should be to replace the fruits and vegetables you would have eaten if your diet were optimal. Scientific evidence generally suggests that there is a dose-response benefit to fruits and vegetables—in other words, each additional serving confers additional benefits.
However, these estimates become pretty uncertain after about ten servings of fruits and vegetables per day, given how few people actually average this many servings on a regular basis.
Nevertheless, eight to ten servings a day is a good bar to shoot for, which forms the basis of the upper end of federal fruit and vegetable intake guidelines. So, your green drink dose should be equivalent to the difference between ten and the number of fruit and vegetable servings you actually get on an average day.
Most brands of green superfood drink powders will give an “equivalent” servings estimate for one serving size of the powder.
Take Athletic Greens, one of our top-ranked products, as an example: it contains the antioxidant potential of one serving of fruits and vegetables per gram of powder (the recommended serving size, 12 grams, would be twelve servings). If you usually only get three servings of fruits and vegetables per day, taking seven grams of Athletic Greens would be a solid dosage.
This “equivalent” dosing strategy isn’t perfect, and eventually nutritionists will come up with a better way to measure the phytonutrient content of green drink powders in a standardized way, but for now, using equivalent servings doses is about as good as you can do.
One final point on recommended dosage is that, based on the scientific literature, it does seem to be better to drink your green superfood drink every day, versus intermittently or sporadically. Regular consumption seems to achieve the best results, at least as measured by blood levels of specific antioxidant compounds.
FAQ
Q: How do you drink a green superfood drink?
A: Green superfood drink powders can be mixed up into just about any liquid. You can add them into a great-tasting protein powder for an easy and nutritious protein shake, or blend the powder into a smoothie.
If you’re travelling, or just want a quick and easy way to up your fruit and vegetable intake, you can even mix up the powder in plain tap water.
Most green superfood drink powders come with a scoop for measuring out servings, but if you want to get sophisticated with your dosage, you can use a scale to measure out your dosage to the gram. Either way, consistently taking a green superfood drink will up your antioxidant levels.
Q: How much of a green superfood drink should you drink?
A: Comparing doses of green superfood drinks is tricky, especially when you’re trying to compare across different brands.
For now, the best method of figuring out how much of a green superfood drink to take every day is to figure out the “equivalent” number of fruits and vegetables per serving, and use that as a guide to make sure your overall fruit and vegetable intake hits ten servings per day or more.
Q: What is a green superfood drink?
A: A green superfood drink is a supplement (usually powder-based, but sometimes instead comes pre-packaged in a liquid solution) that contains concentrated forms of fruits and vegetables.
They are “superfood” drinks because the fruits and vegetables selected for inclusion are typically very high in their antioxidant content, such as berries and cruciferous vegetables (i.e. kale, bok choy, broccoli, etc.).
Likewise, these drinks are typically green in color because ingredients like powdered kale, spirulina, and chlorella contain high amounts of chlorophyll, which gives the powder and the liquid a dark shade of green. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these are only veggie-based drinks, though—the best brands contain plenty of fruits, and even extras like beneficial digestive enzymes and probiotic bacteria.
Q: How often should you take a green superfood drink?
A: According to scientific research on fruit and vegetable concentrates (which includes green superfood drinks), the best results occur when you take a green superfood drink every day.
The best way to take these supplements is to figure out how many servings of fruits and vegetables you get on a typical day, then subtract that from ten (the “ideal” amount of fruit and vegetable servings). So, if you get four servings of fruits and vegetables per day, you might take a green superfood drink every day that provides the equivalent of six servings of fruits and vegetables.
Research that has tracked people who take green superfood drinks has found that drinking them every day will increase blood levels of antioxidants significantly compared to a placebo drink, so it’s better to shoot for everyday consumption than intermittent use (though occasional use is still probably better than never).
Q: Is there caffeine in green superfood drinks?
A: Generally there is no caffeine in green superfood drinks, unless they contain green tea extract. Even so, the actual amount of caffeine in green tea extract is less than what you’d get in a regular cup of green tea (circa 35 mg of caffeine).
A few brands, like Amazing Grass, offer energy blends that specifically include caffeine, so your green superfood drink can serve as an energy drink replacement. We didn’t rank green drinks like this, because they’re less versatile (you can’t really take them at night), but they do fill a nice niche.
Related articles
Recap
Green powders are great to start your day and can be argued as one of the more justified supplements for everybody since most people (in fact, 90% of the population) do not consume enough fruits and vegetables on a regular basis.
Adding a green powder superdrink to your daily regime is a great way to hedge a healthy, on-the-go lifestyle.
Unless you have rare food allergies, they are devoid of side effects, and with a powder form green superfood drink, you can adjust your dosage to make up for the fruits and vegetables you’re missing out on when you don’t have enough time for high-quality meals.
For Alpha XR‘s #1 green drink recommendation, click here.