Thursday, February 23, 2017

Vibrant Health Green Vibrance Review

Green Vibrance, from the Connecticut-based supplement company Vibrant Health, is one of the top 5 best selling greens powders on Bodybuilding.com. Made largely from pulverized plants, a lot of companies market greens powders as replacements for multivitamins and in some cases, replacements for fruits and vegetables themselves.

So, is Green Vibrance a solid supplement, or do its claims outmatch its benefits? I tried it out.

Green Vibrance Ingredients

Green Vibrance has dozens of ingredients, and what’s interesting is that it combines a lot of what other powders would rather specialize in. By that I mean most of the greens supplements I’ve tried focus on their antioxidants without providing a lot of vitamins and minerals, or they focus on probiotics without including digestive enzymes. (For the record, there’s nothing wrong with those approaches, so long as they don’t claim they’re doing anything else.)

Green Vibrance’s ingredients fall into ten categories: Cereal Grasses, Plant Based Micro-Nutrition, Antioxidant Life Preservers, Immune Support, Adaptogens, Skeletal Support, Fiber, Liver Support, Enzymes & Tonics, and Probiotics.

It covers more bases than most of its competitors: the wheat grass and barley grass, the spirulina and chlorella, over a dozen sources of antioxidants that range from tomato to mustard seed, six digestive enzymes, and a dozen strains of bacteria that provide over 25 billion probiotics per serving. That’s ten times what most greens powders contain, if they contain at all, and over three times more than what I would consider its closest competitor, Athletic Greens.

One scoop contains 40 calories, two grams of protein, seven grams of carbs, two grams of fiber, and half a gram of fat.

Green Vibrance Benefits

There is a very, very low bar when it comes to greens powders.

A lot of them only provide antioxidants and probiotics — which is fine, if that’s all they say they deliver. But many claim to be a good replacement for a serve of fruits or vegetables, despite providing next to no vitamins or minerals.

Green Vibrance got my attention for three reasons: it actually contains a lot of vitamins and minerals along with antioxidants and probiotics, their website provides evidence that backs up the product’s claims, and it doesn’t claim to do anything it doesn’t. (Like I said, there’s a low bar in this industry.)

The vitamin and mineral content is among the highest of any greens powder I’ve seen, besides Athletic Greens. One scoop has 250% of the RDI of vitamin D3, which is great, 80 percent of your vitamin C, 70 percent of your selenium, 60 percent of your vitamin K, and 40 percent of your Vitamin B12.

The packaging has a “full disclosure label” and “truth, trust, transparency,” and it actually delivers. It doesn’t say that it is the only supplement you’ll ever need, or it can substitute for real food. It tells you that it supports micronutrient requirements, improves digestion, contributes to immunity, and helps with circulation. Then it lists all its ingredients, how much of each ingredient is in a serving, and directs you to information that tells you why it’s useful and if it’s an effective dose. Again, this is insanely rare.

For example, if you check out their site, it explains that one of the reasons it contains 700mg of sunflower lecithin is because it delivers 160mg of phosphatidyl choline, and 35mg of that ingredient was shown in one study to support cognitive function.

It also explains why it uses the kind of overused term “detoxification” to describe the ingredients that have been shown to improve liver health. It’s a meaningless word that they should have avoided, but it’s forgivable because Green Vibrance does everything it can to back up its claims.

Taste

It doesn’t taste great. (Hey, you can’t win ‘em all.) It’s milder than a lot of greens powders, but it has an aftertaste that’s quite grassy and peppery. Like competitor Texas Superfood, it has a slightly spicy kick to it. It would probably go down easier if mixed with orange juice.

Price

At 65 dollars for 60 servings ($1.08/serving) it’s shockingly cheap for the quality it delivers. The only greens powder I would consider to be better than Green Vibrance is Athletic Greens, which is a whopping $4.23 per serving.

Compare that with $35 for fifteen servings of Onnit’s Earth Grown Nutrients ($2.30/serving) $40 dollars for thirty servings of AI Sports Nutrition Red & Greens XT ($1.33/serving), $30 for thirty servings of PharmaFreak Greens Freak ($1/serving), $50 for ninety servings of Sun Warrior’s Supergreens ($0.55/serving) and $52 for a hundred serves Amazing Grass’s Green Superfood ($0.52/serving).

Green Vibrance is without a doubt a more honest, more nutrient-dense, higher quality product than any of those.

Rating Out of 5

Ingredients: 5

Taste: 2

Effectiveness: 5

Price: 5

The Takeaway

It shouldn’t be unrealistic to want a supplement that tells you what it does and then backs up its claims, but most greens powders utterly fail to do just that. Greens Vibrance doesn’t overstate its claims, it backs up the ones it does make, and it’s fairly cheap. It could definitely taste better, but it gets full marks in ingredients, effectiveness, and price.

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