It’s hard to argue with the allure of a greens powder. Inside these pleasantly packaged tubs and pouches, you’ll allegedly find an elite combination of crushed-up fruits and vegetables that’ll boost your energy, keep you regular, lower stress, and transform you into a more optimized version of yourself. Just mix a daily scoop of these “super” greens into your bottle of water or morning shake and glug it down.
Greens powders are hardly a new concept: Humans have been pulverizing and sipping green plants like tea leaves for at least a thousand years. But the plethora of products that line drugstore shelves today are less like a simple matcha, and more like “fancy multivitamins,” says Jessica Wilson, a California-based clinical dietitian.
And they’re everywhere right now, with a global market projected to hit $960 million by 2035. It’s no wonder greens powders have earned big-name endorsements and become somewhat of a status symbol among wellness influencers.
But do these supplements actually deliver on their promises—and do they offer anything a balanced diet can’t? Here’s what experts think about their lofty claims.
The purported benefits of greens powders
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t regulate supplements in the same way that it rigorously regulates drugs, so companies that produce greens powders—typically made of dehydrated or freeze-dried fruits and vegetables—can’t claim to “diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.” Only a drug that undergoes an FDA-approved clinical trial process can legally meet this standard.
Supplement makers can, however, plaster their “super” greens with buzzwords and claims loosely tied to scientific evidence. “Nothing is stopping them from just saying things how they want to say it,” Wilson notes.
For example, a brand could slap “improves digestion” on its label if it links the benefit to an ingredient in its powder—say, probiotics—as long as it clarifies the statement hasn’t been evaluated by the FDA. It also doesn’t have to be a particularly direct link: The brand would simply need to find any study suggesting the probiotic could theoretically support a part of the digestive process, even if that study was conducted in rats or a petri dish.
(5 things you should know before trusting that supplement.)
“Correlation is not causation. Yet [supplement companies] are allowed to make claims suggestive of causation, like ‘supports heart health’ or ‘supports brain health,’ based on observational research,” explains David Seres, director of medical nutrition and professor of medicine in the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center. “People don’t always realize that wording is not indicative of hard evidence from randomized control trials”—studies that randomly assign people to an intervention group (taking a supplement) or a control group (taking a placebo). “A randomized trial is the only way you can get to cause and effect,” he says.
You May Also Like
Plenty of companies extrapolate the benefits from whole fruits and vegetables in a similar way, says Sara Campbell, an associate professor of kinesiology and health at the Rutgers-New Brunswick Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health. Take apples: “Is the whole apple ground up into the powder, or did they just add the flesh or peels? Both have bioactive compounds that promote health, so eliminating one or the other eliminates that aspect of the fruit’s health-promoting properties,” she explains.
Credible science on the health effects of greens powders, in general, is extremely limited. When Campbell dug into the existing literature, she only turned up 12 papers after searching “green powder” paired with broad terms like “gut” and “health” in PubMed, a reliable database of scientific studies. Most of the papers focused on green tea powder specifically or didn’t examine a supplement powder in its entirety. “From a research perspective, it’s a giant understudied area,” she says.
The potential risks of greens powders
Supplement companies don’t have to prove that what they say is in their powders is actually in their powders, unless they choose to have their product independently tested by a third-party lab, which can verify its listed ingredients and also check for stuff that shouldn’t be in there, like heavy metals, common allergens, or harmful toxins. This issue is well-documented: One 2023 paper found that 89 percent of the 57 supplements studied, including powders, had inaccurate ingredient labels; 12 percent were contaminated with at least one ingredient banned by the FDA.
An occasional scoop of powdered greens is unlikely to harm a generally healthy person, but there’s more of a risk with powders that pack a vitamin punch, particularly fat-soluble vitamins like A and E, Wilson says. Your body stores these in your liver and fatty tissues, unlike water-soluble vitamins, which are flushed out via your urine after your body gets what it needs. Large doses of vitamin E can raise your risk of blood clotting issues, for instance, while exceeding your daily upper limit of vitamin A can trigger joint pain and liver damage.
(How these two vitamin supplements could do more harm than good.)
People with chronic health conditions should also be cautious because some supplements can negatively interact with medications. If you have a chronic digestive condition like irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease, speak with your doctor before you down a greens powder that contains probiotics or rapidly increases your fiber intake, since either of these could exacerbate your symptoms.
A better way to get nutrients
Unless you have a nutrient deficiency, which a primary care doctor can confirm with a blood test, supplements like greens powders offer “no proven benefits,” Seres says. That’s a hefty gamble when you’re shelling out between $30 and $80 for a single tub.
No matter what a supplement claims, experts say it can’t fully replace a balanced diet of foods you enjoy. Prioritizing a powder means you’re missing out on the perks of whole fruits or vegetables, particularly their fiber content: You might get 2 grams of fiber in a scoop of greens, but you’d get 6 grams from simply eating a pear.
“You would theoretically get a lot more fiber just by eating vegetables throughout the day,” Campbell says. (And eating a diverse variety of these fibers is known to positively influence the gut microbiome.)
The thing is, you might feel better after you take the greens a fitness influencer swears by, especially if your diet was severely lacking in produce before (and it’s true, most Americans aren’t getting enough).
But, as Wilson posits, “Do we need everything that’s in these supplements? I don’t need beet root powder or pineapple fruit concentrate every day. The idea that we need everything that’s in these all of the time is a great marketing tool.”
