Stop eating my food.
Are you a cow?
You might think that's a strange question to ask someone, but if you have been buying most greens powders with ingredients such as wheatgrass, barley grass, and alfalfa, you've been eating cow food.
But aren't those greens super nutritious? While they have a bit of nutrition, they are in those greens powders because they are super inexpensive to grow and produce. This allows companies to make large tubs of powders for next to nothing and have huge profit margins.
More nutrient-dense plants like lacinato (dinosaur) kale, Swiss chard, spinach, collard greens, and mustard greens have more nutrient density than grass but are much more expensive, so it's more profitable to fill up the tubs with grass and just a tiny pinch of the more nutrient-dense green foods.
While cows love the taste of grass, most people don't. That's why most green powders are filled with questionable sweeteners and flavorings (artificial and "natural") to cover up the grassy taste.
In addition, most green powders are spray-dried, or dried at high temperatures, which can lead to an off taste and a significant loss of the nutritional value of the foods. This can damage the greens, and then companies need to add emulsifiers, such as lecithin (often extracted with hexane and acetone), to make the powder mix easier.
Look for greens powders without added sweeteners or flavorings ("natural" flavorings are not natural) that are dried at low temperatures, under 120 degrees.
Most greens powders add fillers like FOS, Inulin, flax, and pectin. While they may claim benefits from those ingredients, they are just cheap fillers that allow the companies to use far fewer green foods, greatly increasing their profits. Look for greens powders free of fillers and that only contain green foods.
Simplicity is best for green food powders, but unfortunately, most manufacturers have decided that marketing is more important than making a great product.
Many products contain twenty or more ingredients. One popular brand has over fifty ingredients. While this may look good on the label, the amounts of nearly all ingredients are too low to be beneficial or have any effect. This is an example of a common practice in the supplement industry called fairy dusting. While it is excellent for marketing purposes, it's just a waste of money for the people purchasing it.
Look for greens powders with only a handful of ingredients to ensure you get enough of each to benefit. Your health is too important to leave up to the marketing departments of big-name companies like Nestle.
Do you know where all of the ingredients in your green food come from? I'm not talking about the country of origin but the actual farms. Every country has good and bad farms, so knowing where the ingredients are grown is very important.
The best greens powder producers tell you where each ingredient comes from, right down to the farm. Check out our Farm To Bottle Project to learn more about the importance of knowing where all the ingredients in your supplements come from. A company should be proud of its sources, not try to hide them.
Most companies do not grow or produce their ingredients. They buy bulk powders from middlemen. These middlemen often combine ingredients from various suppliers in many different places, making it impossible to know where the ingredients come from or how they were grown.
Look for greens powders from companies that grow their greens as well as dry and produce the products themselves or, at the very least, source their ingredients directly from the farmers, not from middlemen.
The quality of the ingredients matters greatly. Many companies use old, yellow, and brown leaves that lack nutritional value but are cheap and great for marketing and profits. It does not matter if the ingredients have no real value left; they can still be listed as an ingredient on the label.
Another common practice is to use commonly discarded parts like stems, which have very little nutritional value, but using just the stems is very profitable and adds lots of bulk. Companies can still list Swiss chard as an ingredient, even if they use the stems and none of the leaves. However, the buyer is the one who pays the penalty because they got a greens powder with no nutritional value.
You want your greens powder to be made with freshly harvested greens without the stems, which are processed and dried within hours of harvesting to have the highest nutritional value.
Light is the enemy of most nutrients. Light causes a loss of nutritional value. Greens powders should be packaged in dark glass to prevent the loss of essential nutrients and compounds. Plus, packaging in glass means less plastic, which is excellent!
We are very excited to announce the launch of Greens Without The Grass! It represents the next evolution of green food powders.
We grew tired of seeing green products full of grass, fillers, sweeteners, and flavorings. We were sick of companies refusing to tell us where the ingredients came from. We wanted something better.
Greens Without The Grass is a partnership between The Lone Duck Farm and Rooted Nutrition.
Together, we grow, process, dry, and package these incredible green foods on the farm in Saugerties, New York.
All the green foods used in the products are grown using regenerative agriculture on The Lone Duck Farm. Dark, nutrient-rich soil is constantly enriched with compost produced from the farm's animals, not synthetic or petroleum-derived fertilizers. This produces vegetables with incredible nutrient density, far more than what you get at the grocery store.
No synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides are ever used, and every ingredient is non-GMO. It is genuinely a beyond organic farm.
Within twenty-four hours of being harvested, the greens are washed, and hand cut to remove debris, stems, and leaves that do not meet our strict standards. The friendly farm goats eat all the non-usable parts, so nothing is wasted!
The greens are then low-temperature air-dried, under 115 degrees, to preserve the nutrient and enzyme content. They are then milled into a fine powder and packaged in dark glass jars with metal lids.
Unlike most green powders, which taste like a freshly mowed lawn or cover up the taste with sweeteners and flavorings, Greens Without The Grass products taste fresh and vibrant, with grassiness or grittiness. One heaping teaspoon supplies a whole serving of dark, leafy green vegetables.
They mix easily into smoothies or other beverages without emulsifiers like lecithin. You can also bake with them or add them to sauces to easily up the nutritional content.
They are the easiest way to get your greens every day without cooking or cleaning up. Plus, unlike those greens and containers of spring mix sitting in the back of your fridge waiting to be thrown away, Greens Without The Grass powders will last for over a year in your cabinet, provided they are kept cool and dry.
It's time you had a better green powder experience! Use code greens at checkout to save 20% on any Greens Without The Grass product!
If you have any questions about our Greens Without The Grass products, email us at info@rooted-nutrition.com, and we would be happy to help.
