So there you are pack in hand or scrolling through a website to see what is the best nutritional powder for you. Surely the one with the most ingredients per serving must the best, right? 10 ingredients must be better than 2? Well, not necessarily.
Today there are more protein and nutritional powders than ever on the market and some have lots of ingredients in one serving, so the back of pack can look like a roll call of health boosting ingredients which sound great. But… could it be that a smaller number of ingredients per serving will actually give you more health benefits per serving? We think in some cases yes it will. We say that for a number of reasons;
1) because there is only so much powder you can put in any one serving and to be able to make a health claim there is a certain level of nutrition that must be available from the ingredients and that can get diluted the more ingredients there are
2) Because some ingredients don’t have an RDA so its hard to tell how much of it you’d need and
3) Because the words “contains vitamin x” doesn’t necessarily mean that it will give you any measurable benefit per serving from it.
For example there are only 2 ingredients in that protein’s Blissful Brown Rice and Raw Cacao Super Protein BUT those two ingredients will deliver a very high number of health benefits. So from just 2 ingredients - Organic Raw Cacao and Plant Protein - you will know that it will help you build and maintain muscles; be high in fibre; help you maintain normal energy yielding metabolism; help you reduce tiredness and fatigue; contribute to maintenance of bones and teeth; contribute to the normal functioning of the nervous system and immune system; contribute to normal blood pressure and contribute to normal muscle function… phew!
Our advice on what can be a rather confusing topic is to read the back of the pack and see what benefit per serving you will get and not just “contains ingredient x “ as they are 2 very different things