Years ago, I had a roommate who worked out every day and would also consume Dionysian amounts of Entenmann’s cake. My kind of guy. We got along, in part, because of a shared conviction that the pursuit of physical fitness didn’t preclude putting away vast quantities of processed sugar. Not to brag, but in my prime I could eat an entire family size package of Chips Ahoy as a post-run snack. The glories of youth.
But you get older and, you’d like to think, wiser. When I recently saw my former roommate, he mentioned that he’d started taking the popular daily supplement powder AG1 as a form of nutritional insurance. He is not alone; the brand was valued at $1.2 billion in 2022 and has been dubbed a “unicorn” in an overcrowded supplement market.
Part of this success can be attributed to seductive messaging: the AG1 website tells us that it is a “science-driven supplement that supports physical health and mental performance” and is “designed to replace multiple supplements by providing a comprehensive blend of nutrients in one tasty scoop each day.” That tasty scoop consists of 12 grams of greens powder, which are meant to be mixed with 8 ounces of water and consumed on a daily basis. Its purported benefits include increased energy, immunity defense, and improved gut health.
An optimized nutritional boost in an easily administered dose. Needless to say, we’ve heard similar promises before. But such miracle elixirs make us ever-keen to ask the question: Could it be true this time?
What Is AG1?
Formerly known as “Athletic Greens,” AG1 is one of the more prominent examples of the recent powdered greens craze. The brand was founded in 2010 by Chris Ashenden, an entrepreneur, athlete, and fitness enthusiast from New Zealand.
Earlier this year, AG1 announced that Kat Cole, a former COO and president at the franchise restaurant group Focus Brands (now named GoTo Foods), would be succeeding Ashenden as the company’s CEO, though Ashenden will remain on the board of directors.
According to the AG1 website, the supplement is for anyone “who wants to ensure their nutritional needs are met on a daily basis” in an “obsessively curated product” that contains multivitamins and multiminerals, pre- and probiotics, antioxidants, and buzzy “superfoods” whose supposed health benefits are touted by the brand. Other ingredients include: rose hip fruit powder (“a source of phytonutrients that are foundational for the body”), dandelion root (“known to help soothe the stomach and support digestive enzyme secretion”), and slippery elm bark powder (“known to soothe the gut lining”).
Obsessive curation doesn’t come cheap; a monthly supply of AG1 will set you back $79. By comparison, a month’s worth of Greens and Superfoods from Bloom Nutrition costs about $35. But AG1 has a unique set of ingredients and a carefully crafted image of exclusivity, positioning itself as the Cadillac of the supplement world.
It’s certainly true that no other greens powder company has AG1’s celebrity firepower. The brand has been endorsed by athletes like Olympic runner Allyson Felix and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, as well as an endless roster of wellness and fitness influencers. Hamilton has invested in the company, as have Hugh Jackman and Cindy Crawford. Alex Honnold, who also holds a minority stake, is another AG1 fan. In an email, the Free Solo star told me that while it was hard to put his finger on what exactly he loved about the product, he nonetheless regarded it as “part of a healthy morning routine.”
“It helps me feel generally well—sick less often, fewer stomach issues, etc.,” Honnold said.
Like many brands, AG1 has an affiliate marketing program, partnership opportunities for content creators, as well as the tried-and-true discount for subscribers who get their friends to sign up. According to its website, the company pays out a 15-percent commission on subscription sales by referral.
The company has also been smart about partnering with some of the biggest names on the self-optimization podcast scene, including Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Rich Roll, and Andrew Huberman. Although the Huberman Lab didn’t respond to a request for comment on the nature of its partnership with AG1, the podcast’s sponsorship page notes that they “only work with brands whose products we personally use and love.”
Do We Need Multivitamins and Greens Powders in the First Place?
On AG1’s website, under a subheading that asks “What products does AG1 replace?” I found the following: “One daily serving of AG1 eliminates the need for other supplements such as a multivitamin, probiotics, greens, and superfood powders, vitamin B complex, and vitamin C tablets.” The product, we learn, “supports brain, gut, and immune health.” A single-arm study (which means a study with no control group) with 35 participants funded by AG1 found that most users felt “more calm” and that their “digestion improved” after three months of using the product.
Of course, increased calmness and improved digestion are rather vague and subjective metrics by which to proclaim efficacy. Purveyors of dietary supplements have to be careful about any purported health claims, lest they end up being classified as a drug—at which point they would need to be vetted by the FDA. (On the AG1 website, there’s an asterisk attached to pretty much all of the alleged benefits of its ingredients to inform us that “these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration” and that “this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”)
Case in point: in 2023 the marketing and manufacturing companies behind dietary supplement Balance of Nature had to temporarily pause operations following an FDA letter warning that the company was not in compliance with federal regulations because its health claims technically made it a “new drug” that required FDA approval. In a separate case earlier that year, Balance of Nature had to pay a $1.1 million settlement as part of a consumer protection lawsuit in California that took the brand to task for alleging it could help treat or prevent serious diseases like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
As Outside has covered in the past, many prominent voices in the medical community don’t think daily multivitamins are necessary. David Seres, a professor of medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center, has long beat the drum for us to take a more skeptical stance toward multivitamins and the broader supplement market. Seres told me that AG1 was another example of what was essentially a “freeze-dried salad of exotic fruits and vegetables.”
Seres was adamant that, unless one has a known deficiency of a particular vitamin or mineral, multivitamins have no proven benefit. He also advised against taking daily multivitamins as a preemptive measure. “To my knowledge, there is no high quality evidence of any health benefit from multivitamin supplementation in the general population,” Seres told me. “And there is evidence that there is potential for harm.”
Seres referred me to a 2022 meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which pooled 84 separate studies to conclude that vitamin and mineral supplementation was associated with “little to no benefit” in preventing cancer and cardiovascular disease. (AG1 was not a part of this analysis.) As for the what’s-the-harm-in-taking-a-supplement-anyway approach, Seres cited a 2011 study of men in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico that appeared to link an increased risk of prostate cancer with vitamin E supplementation.
When I ran this summation by a spokesperson at AG1, she provided the following statement: “Each of the ingredients in AG1 is backed by peer-reviewed literature. Our team of scientists and researchers have reviewed thousands of studies as part of the formulation and continuous improvement process for AG1.”
It should be noted that the academic community is not unanimously against multivitamin use. A recent study by university scientists, for instance, found that multivitamins might help counteract cognitive decline in older adults.
Nor is everyone as dismissive of greens powders as Seres. Emily Prpa, a registered nutritionist in the UK, told me that for some groups—like first-year college kids with “very beige” diets of processed foods—the multivitamin-as-insurance approach probably does make some sense. As for the possibility of doing harm through a potential vitamin overdose, Prpa told me that, generally, the body was very good at handling excess nutrients.
However, Prpa stressed that her approach was “food first” and that people can “meet their vitamin and nutrient needs through a well-balanced diet.” She suggested that the “natural” way of getting one’s nutrients was preferable anyway, since certain fat-soluble vitamins (like vitamin A) are more effectively absorbed with food.
Prpa also explained that large doses of one mineral might get in the way of your body absorbing other micronutrients ingested at the same time—a concept known as competitive absorption. “With some of these proprietary blends where they are just mixing a lot of things together, that’s possibly a red flag,” Prpa said. “Are you actually getting all of those vitamins and minerals that they say you’re gonna get from one scoop? It’s unlikely.”
The Research Behind AG1
A company spokesperson for AG1 sent me the following statement: “We have worked with third-party experts to conduct studies and research to further validate the benefits of AG1 as a whole, beyond the research and studies for ingredients. These are published on drinkag1.com and peer-reviewed scientific journals, and show significant evidence of the efficacy of AG1.”
There’s a section on the company’s website labeled “Research,” which lists peer-reviewed studies, albeit ones that are funded by AG1 and largely co-authored by AG1 employees. According to the AG1 spokesperson: “As is standard for the industry, the studies on AG1 are funded by the company and conducted by independent third-party experts and labs. These studies are in addition to a wide body of third-party literature to support efficacy and safety of the ingredients in AG1.”
It’s worth noting that most of these studies investigated the product’s potential beneficial impact on the gastrointestinal tract using a simulator that “mimics the physiological and biological conditions found in the human gut” and were not conducted on actual humans. There’s nothing wrong with that—in vitro studies are safer and less invasive—but as the authors of the studies themselves point out, further investigations are needed to verify the product’s actual health benefits for humans in a clinical setting. The verdict, in other words, is still out.
The company’s website also mentions a clinical trial on human subjects that involved a double-blind trial with 30 participants in which healthy adults were given either AG1 or a placebo for one month. (The study was just published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition in October.) Subsequent stool samples purportedly revealed that AG1 enriched the microbiome by “more than doubling the levels of healthy bacteria known to bolster digestion.”
The healthy bacteria in question appear to be Lactobacillus acidophilus UALa-01 and Bifidobacterium bifidum UABb-10, which are both listed on AG1’s ingredients list. However, while L. acidophilus and B. bifidum are some of the better known species of probiotics, there isn’t much proof that the specific AG1 strains have any health benefits.
The only study that comes up when you look up Lactobacillus acidophilus UALa-01 in the National Library of Medicine’s database, PubMed.com, is a 12-week controlled trial on the effects of the probiotic on bone mineral density and calcium levels in postmenopausal women. The conclusion of the study notes that: “The consumption of L. acidophilus probiotics daily for 12 weeks among postmenopausal women does not affect the profile of BMD, but it may help in stabilizing bone turnover . . . However, it is worth noting that three months of probiotic supplementation could potentially disrupt calcium and glucose status in postmenopausal women.”
When I asked AG1 why they chose these specific strains of bacteria despite a relative lack of published research on them, a company spokesperson replied: “The probiotics in AG1, Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum, are well researched and chosen for their safety profile across a variety of populations.”
Professor Gregor Reid, a distinguished professor emeritus at Canada’s Western University and author of the 2023 book Probiotics: A Story About Hope, told me that “people are getting sort of carried away with the idea that everything that is Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium is a probiotic and that’s not the case.”
“For the consumer, it’s a shame because they seem to think that all probiotics are the same and therefore, if you’re taking a probiotic, it must be good,” he said. “But unless there’s clinical data to support it then you really don’t know what it’s doing.”
Reid is on the scientific board of the probiotic supplement company Seed, and might be incentivized to be critical of a rival brand’s product. However, Reid was adamant that he is not claiming that AG1 is a bad product, but that the onus is on a probiotics company to prove the nutritional value of its specific strains. As he puts it, “The question is where’s the clinical data showing these two strains have a probiotic effect and what is the effect?”
As a practical resource for people who want to do their own research, Reid recommends a guide to probiotic products—a fairly expansive directory of products that lists probiotic strains and applications, as well as relevant studies, which is put together by the Alliance for Education on Probiotics. Lest he be accused of bias, Reid pointed out that neither AG1 nor Seed are listed on the site.
So What’s the Takeaway?
Should you take AG1? The tacit promise of a product where every ingredient is “backed by peer-reviewed literature” is that a proprietary blend of those ingredients will confer an optimized synthesis of every alleged benefit and minimal side effects. At present, there have been no independent studies that verify that AG1 does this.
But it’s also not hard to find people who, like Honnold, believe that their daily greens powder fix does have some positive effect. Whether that perceived improvement is a consequence of AG1’s formula, or because investing $79 per month in a trendy wellness product makes you more likely to take ownership of your health in other ways, remains up for debate. But to paraphrase the words of greens powder skeptics, why not just eat a few more damn vegetables?
Indeed, usually when articles come out questioning the claims of some new superfood-laden wunderproduct, they will conclude with a reminder that there isn’t a way to outhack the conventional healthy diet. (AG1 does not claim that its product eliminates the need for healthy eating.) It’s always so disappointing. Because who doesn’t want to live in a world where the adverse effects of last night’s boozy bacchanalia can be neutralized with an ashwagandha root smoothie?
Our collective desire for the nutritional panacea comes at a moment when distrust toward experts might be at an all-time high. According to Seres, part of the reason why so many people prefer to listen to influencer health gurus rather than scientists is that the latter group often hasn’t done a good job in communicating dietary advice to the general public. (AG1’s website notes that the company has an “in-house team of doctors, scientists, and researchers.”) The result is a certain amount of cynicism; Seres said the first question he hears when new guidelines are announced is, “OK, are eggs in or out this time?”
“People follow the recommendations of scientists and nutritional guidelines for the three most important reasons possible: they want to live longer; they want to live healthier; and they want to be happier,” Seres said. “When we change our minds as scientists—which we don’t do frivolously but based on new evidence—we need to do a better job of explaining why, so that people are actually willing to listen to us.”
If Seres has any words of comfort for those who may be dismayed that we can’t cancel out our food vices with a greens powder supplement, it’s that we should regard perfect nutrition as a utopia, rather than something we need to beat ourselves up for not achieving.
As he puts it: “Shooting for the ideal diet is the goal; achieving it is not.”
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