The Best Green Superfoods That You Need in Your Diet

In our modern, hectic, rushed, and overworked lives, many of us often find ourselves too busy to prepare or sometimes even eat healthy, balanced, and home-cooked meals. Fast food was once a luxury, a treat, something that was only occasionally eaten when there was a reason for it. Now, many people find themselves so busy from work that fast food is a regular staple of their diet, idling in the drive-through lanes as part of their commute multiple times every week.

There is no simple solution to long commutes and busy work schedules, but there is something that can be implemented into your diet to ensure that, even if you don’t have time to eat as healthy as you’d like, your body is getting everything that it needs.

Iceberg lettuce has no nutritional value, yet it is the main staple of most side salads that you find in fast casual and fast food restaurants. Some may be eating these iceberg salads with every meal and thinking that they are getting their required daily greens-based nutrients, but they are woefully mistaken.

We will use this article to help you find simple ingredients that can be added to your diet to help take your nutrition to the next level. If you are so inclined, we will even include several examples of supplements that pack the nutrition derived from multiple green superfoods into a single serving.

What is a Green Superfood?

Green superfoods are simple additions to your daily diet that provide multiple health benefits from a single source. Many of us learned about our veggies and the individual benefits that they provide as kids: eat your carrots to help your eyesight, drink milk for strong bones & teeth. Green superfoods, on the other hand, pack so much nutritional value into a single low-calorie and nutrient-dense food source that they may help many of your body’s different systems from a single ingredient.

Green superfoods can be of the ancient variety, ingredients that have been utilized for centuries on account of the many benefits that they provide, or other parts of our modern diet. Some of these superfoods from both camps include:

Ancient green superfoods

• Spirulina
• Chlorella
• Chlorophyll
• Ginko Biloba
• Rhodiola
• Maca root
• Cereal grasses

Modern diet green superfoods

• Dark, leafy (cruciferous) greens
• Green tea
• Olive oil
• Ginger
• Turmeric (or curcumin)
• Avocado
• Mushrooms
• Seaweed
• Broccoli

Are Green Superfoods Healthy?

If you haven’t seen the picture that we’ve been trying to paint so far, then let’s answer this question as plainly as possible. Yes, green superfoods are not only healthy, but they are often far healthier than the standard foods that may be found in a healthy diet. 

Many of these foods are considered green superfoods because they provide multiple health benefits in the same food source: healthy fats, an ability to lower cholesterol, loads of vitamins & minerals across a variety of groups, some aid your body in detoxification, and even though they are plant-based, some can offer some of the same benefits to a healthy diet as eating fish.

Not only are they healthy, but some, like Spirulina, are considered the healthiest food substances on the planet because of how much nutrition they pack into a single serving.

How Can I Get Green Superfoods into my Diet?

One argument that has long been made by income inequality activists is the wide disparity in affordability between junk or fast food and healthy, organic, chemical-free food. Unfortunately, they aren’t wrong about that, and eating healthy these days is significantly more expensive than filling your body with garbage.

Thankfully there are some supplements that we will list below that are downright affordable, while others on the market cost more than a trip to Whole Foods. The great thing about the green superfood powder supplements listed below is that, no matter how busy you are, they provide the ability to drink a single glass of their greens powders every day and add not only all of the greens-based nutrients that you need, but they also pack in quite a few green superfoods. And by getting all of them in a single package, you can save substantially on your grocery bill yet still get all of the organic & healthy green superfoods that you need.

So if you are one of the people described in the introduction who spends a lot of long hours at work and don’t foresee any change to that, these greens supplements provide a quick, simple, and affordable way to introduce all of your daily greens and even some green superfoods into your schedule, no matter how hectic. 

Not all green superfood supplements are created equal, so we will list the supplements that we have reviewed & liked in order of our preference, from the top (being our favorite) to the bottom (still good, but our least favorite of the top three). 

If you want to know how to get green superfoods into your daily diet, any supplement on the list below can help you do just that.

Green Vibrance by Vibrant Health

If you are looking for a single drink that can get all that a healthy body needs (and then some) into your diet every day, we haven’t found any that are better than Green Vibrance. We tend to toot the Vibrant Health horn a lot because everything from this company to their products set the gold standard for the health supplement industry, and Green Vibrance is no different.  

To start with, the company provides radical transparency with the ingredient lists on its products, not only listing every single ingredient (which they all have to) but also listing the exact amount of said ingredient in their mixtures (Vibrant is the only major plant-based supplement company that we know of who does it). 

This may not seem like a big deal to the casual observer, but it really is to those who know what they’re looking for. Many of the superfoods used in these greens superfood powders are touted as providing certain benefits - adaptogens like Rhodiola or Maca root, Gingko Biloba, for example. 

Some of these green superfoods, such as the ones listed above, have been scientifically proven in a laboratory setting to provide certain health benefits. In those studies, they not only determine whether these green superfoods can provide said benefits, but how much it takes of them to do so. 

Rhodiola, for example, is a root that grows in Russia and Asia. It has been proven to increase exercise endurance, positively affect mood, decrease symptoms of depression, and provide many other health functions. These studies have proven that it provides these benefits when taken in increments of 1200mg daily - but no benefits are proven if taken in smaller doses. Several major green superfood supplements include Rhodiola and/or Maca root in their mixes, but simple math would indicate that it isn’t present in significant amounts to provide the full potential that the ingredient can.

By providing total transparency of their ingredients, however, we know that the Gingko Biloba, pomegranate, green tea, Spirulina, Chlorella, and others are present in significant enough amounts within Green Vibrance to actually produce the necessary health effects. 

But that’s only a small part of the reason why Green Vibrance is our favorite greens superfood supplement - by a long shot. On top of the ingredient transparency, Green Vibrance only packs 40 calories and 2g of sugars into your daily intake, while also packing on 3g of fiber. Greens supplements aren’t meal replacements, they are an adjunct to your daily diet. Being low in calories and sugar makes it a healthy addition to your diet, while the fiber helps you feel full longer and aids your body in absorbing the nutrients inside the drink.

Green Vibrance provides all of your daily needed greens, but goes way beyond that. It includes the three major cereal grasses (wheatgrass, oat grass, and barley grass) in two different forms (leaf powder and juice powder). We can’t go into the significant benefits of these cereal grasses here, but just know that they are each superfoods in and of themselves.

Green Vibrance then provides 11 different types of plant-based nutrition, 14 different superfruit-based antioxidants, immune support, adaptogens (that help your body better respond to stress), skeletal support, plenty of fiber (as already noted), liver support, digestive enzymes & tonics, and 25 billion CFUs of probiotics from 12 different strains.

It should be noted that many of these green superfood supplements provide probiotics, but Green Vibrance delivers the greatest number and most variety by far. Different probiotic strains provide different health benefits, and the variety provided here provides support to many different parts of your body (and health & wellness).

Ka’Chava

Ka’Chava is another superfood supplement that isn’t focused mainly on greens, but does pack a lot of different types of superfoods into the drink. Pulling from over 85 different superfoods, Ka’Chava has 240 calories, 7g of fat, 6g of fiber (which as we said is a good thing), and a whopping 25g of plant-based protein.

Ka’Chava is another superfood supplement that hides its exact ingredient amounts behind proprietary blends, and by our math, several of the key ingredients are not present in large enough quantities to provide their scientifically-proven benefits (maca root, probiotics, and mushrooms). Despite those inadequacies, Ka’Chava does pack an awful lot of a nutritional punch into a single glass.

The 240 calories and 25g of protein make this a great snack replacement, but not a meal replacement as it is often touted. While you may have always been taught that calories are evil & to be avoided at all costs, calories are used on a scientific basis as a measure of energy. 

The bare minimum recommended caloric intake for a not-so-active person is 2,000 calories per day, meaning that if you’re only taking in 240 calories per meal, you likely aren’t hitting that threshold. Low-calorie gurus may tell you that’s a good thing, but it also means that you won’t have enough energy throughout the day to do much - no matter how many green superfoods you’re consuming.

The fiber and protein combo in Ka’Chava both help you to feel fuller longer, which means this superfood supplement would be an excellent option to replace a late-morning or mid-day snack, supercharging your body with plenty of nutrition and eliminating what may be a rather unhealthy part of your diet (people typically choose unhealthy options for snacks, especially if they are stressed, tired, or calorie deprived).

Athletic Greens (now AG1)

Athletic Greens is another wildly popular green superfood supplement but is also another one that hides its exact ingredient mix behind proprietary blends. The company boasts that every scoop of Athletic Greens provides 12 servings of greens-based nutrition, which is pretty good no matter what.

With over 75 different healthy ingredients used to make the overall mixture, Athletic Greens includes blends that are meant to supplement your daily diet with a full accounting of your day’s needed greens-based nutrition, an Alkaline, Nutrient-Dense Raw Superfood Complex, Nutrient-Dense Extracts, Herbs & Antioxidants, Digestive Enzyme & Super Mushroom Complex, and a Dairy-Free Probiotoics blend that includes 7.2 billion CFUs from two different strains.

Once again, simple math tells us that several key ingredients here are lacking adequate quantities to provide all of the health benefits they could (Rhodiola, mushrooms), and they only include two different strains of probiotics with 7.2 billion CFUs (less than ⅓ the probiotics and ⅙ the strains of Green Vibrance).

Athletic Greens is also the most expensive greens supplement on the market, which really makes us upset that they don’t allow consumers to know exactly what they’re getting in every scoop. Regardless, Athletic Greens does pack a lot of nutrients into its formula and provides multiple different green superfoods in every bag - we just don’t know exactly how much of them are there.

Closing

Aztec runners used Spirulina, derived from algae, to power their runners who had to physically take messages between the leaders of different cities. NASA even studied the green superfood as a way to provide enough nutrition to their astronauts on the coveted Mars mission. Certain green superfoods have been a part of the human diet for centuries, but are only now being rediscovered and popularized in our modern culture because of the wealth of health benefits that they provide.

If you are looking for a way to supercharge your daily diet with the benefits that these green superfoods provide, use the list above to find a great green superfood supplement that can provide many of them in a single glass.