Nutritionist Susie Burrell delves into the science behind green powders and when they’re worth the money they’re expensive for.
If there’s one nutritional message that has stood the test of time, it is to eat your vegetables. While this is the buzzword of dietitians and nutritionists everywhere, fewer than 1 in 10 Aussies eat near the recommended number of servings of vegetables, let alone their super-nutritious greens.
So if you could skip the drama of eating and preparing mountains of kale, broccoli, and spinach every day and just replace it with a super nutritious green powder, should you?
We take a closer look at the science of green powder to see if they’re really worth the money.
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There is no doubt that vegetables, especially our leafy cabbage vegetables, are some of the most nutritious foods we can include in our diet.
Not only are they packed full of essential nutrients, including extremely high levels of fiber, folic acid, vitamins C and E, but it’s especially their powerful anti-cancer molecules that link these vegetables to such significant health outcomes, including lower risk, develop several types of cancer.
While there isn’t a specific recommendation for ideal veggie intakes, aiming for at least one serving of green veggies per day will go a long way toward meeting your daily folic acid and vitamin C intake, while a few servings will significantly increase your total nutrient intake.
For most people, the more vegetables we consume, the better, unless you need to monitor your vitamin K intake and discuss with your doctor how much of the leafy green vegetables you can safely consume each day.
Just as juicing is considered the holy grail when it comes to concentrating our vegetable consumption, fruit and vegetable powders are where fresh foods are processed and their key nutrients like vitamins and minerals are extracted and blended into a unique nutritional blend and at relatively high prices sold are incredibly popular.
Retailing between $ 30 and $ 100 a month, green powders are marketed as health elixirs and are often promoted by attractive, healthy celebrities who flaunt them as an explanation of their good looks and genetic blessings. In fact, if you know your vegetable intake could use some work, increasing your intake of some of these essential nutrients seems like a sensible way.
The problem is that while green powders may sound amazing, the science about their effectiveness is lacking. Of the few research studies available, the only evidence in their favor is for blood pressure or gut health benefits when the powders contain other additives such as prebiotic fiber. As such, it seems at best that you can tick the box for extra folate or vitamin C with your expensive green powder.
When it comes to nutrition, it’s not just the nutrients we get from food, but also the synergistic way in which the various nutrients work together in whole foods that translate into nutritional benefits, some of which we still don’t fully understand to understand.
You can’t get this from a powder no matter how much money you pay for it. This means that if your goal is to ultimately improve your health by consuming more greens, the only way to achieve it is to eat them.
The most important thing that you can do for your health and wellbeing in the long term is to eat more vegetables. No matter how you enjoy them – you can’t go wrong in soup, juice, baked, roasted or dripped in butter.
So, make your kale or spinach taste better and add at least two servings to your diet every day.
And before spending big bucks on an expensive powder, remember that for the $ 60 you would have spent on a powder, you can get a truckload of fresh or even frozen vegetables that may or may not really make a difference Not.
