I’ve been fascinated by a question that a friend of mine recently texted: “Is Athletic Greens worth it or can I get by with one of the cheaper alternatives?”
If you haven’t come across it, Athletic Greens (now rebranded as AG1) is a powdered supplement that’s been successfully branded as a high-end health ritual.
You may have come across is on podcast adds or your favorite influencer’s social media pages, AG1 is marketed as an “all-in-one” nutrition solution — a scoop of greens in water that promises improved immunity, gut health, energy, and performance, all for just $99/month.1
The reason that question fascinated me so much is that the implicit premise of the question isn’t whether Athletic Greens is good for you, it’s whether it’s worth the money.
And that question - is it worth the money? - is what you come across when you “research” the product.
Look at the Google search results: it’s just a bunch of people who tried AG1 for a month writing about their subjective experience with a silly conclusion about the value proposition.
There’s even a post about it on the Peter Attia subreddit where the discussion very quickly devolves from whether AG1 is worth the money into troubleshooting about cleaning blenders and keeping produce fresh.
So my friend’s question perfectly mirrored the online discourse - the health benefit is implicit, the question is just whether AG1 is worth your money.
I’m less interested in the value question because it’s fundamentally unanswerable2 than I am in the question of what do the actual studies on AG1 show about how it impacts health?
The people behind AG1 seem to put care into their ingredients and rigorously test their product
If you read posts on X from the CEO of AG1, you can see an overview of the research on the product.
When you dig into their website, they have some interesting data on the product, which I’ll get into shortly.
I am pretty impressed with their quality control and safety process, and the reason that the product costs so much seems to be mostly because they use a lot of high quality ingredients that cost money.
Since the biggest concern I have about most nutritional supplements is about quality control and safety, I appreciate the way that these folks are transparent about their third party testing and appear to be quite rigorous about their quality control.
With AG1, I don’t have much concern about whether the product matches the label - the company seems reputable and their testing is rigorous.
Fixing nutrient deficiencies ≠ optimizing health
Whether a nutritional supplement makes sense for an individual depends on the problem that person is trying to solve.3
One of the biggest challenges is that so many of the reasons people take supplements are to help subjective outcomes that aren’t well measured before and after the intervention.4
If you have a nutrient deficiency, then supplementing to fix that deficiency is a good idea.
But if you don’t have a deficiency, I’m not sure that there’s a persuasive reason to get more of that nutrient.
And if you’re going to use AG1 to fix that deficiency, we don’t know whether it’s as good or better for fixing the problem by simply taking the nutrient in question.5
So when I learn that AG1 increases folate in red blood cells, it’s not clear that 1) I need to have my RBC folate increased or 2) that AG1 is better at doing this than a folate supplement or some spinach.
And the downstream question that I have next is how long does the problem get solved for?
If we are fixing a nutrient deficiency by using AG1, and then we don’t fix our underlying diet, we’re stuck taking AG1 forever unless we want to become nutritionally deficient.
Or take another issue that AG1 impacts: the microbiome. Remember that microbiome marketing ≠ actual health improvement
Another major selling point of the product is the enhancement of the microbiome after taking the product.
It seems fairly clear that AG1 impacts the bacteria in our gut:
But the microbiome is a complex and dynamic system that impacts many aspects of chronic disease and health.
A short term study of a handful of people demonstrating a change in a few species of Lactobacillus is certainly interesting, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the way that change impacts chronic disease risk - or any long term health outcome.
And the same durability problem as the folate question above persists - even if we assume the impact is beneficial, are the changes permanent? Or does this mean we are now committed to taking AG1 forever?
Why are vegetables good for us? Is it just because your mom said they were?
You could spend thousands of words talking about the theory of why vegetables are supposedly good for us.6
Is it because of the vitamins and minerals like vitamin C or magnesium?
Is it because of all of the phytonutrients like flavonoids, anthocyanins, and polyphenols?
Is it because of the fiber?
Is it because of the way that we need to chew them more and that has a positive impact on hard palate development?
If you are confident that the benefit of vegetables comes from their vitamins/minerals/phytonutrients, then you can feel highly confident that AG1 replaces some of your produce consumption.
But if you think a large part of the beneficial impact of plant matter comes from the impact of fiber, then AG1 isn’t going to cover your bases.
And if you’re like me and don’t have much confidence that we truly understand the mechanism of benefit of plant matter, you’re going to be left with uncertainty about the role that AG1 fills in your diet.
I don’t want to spend too much time here because I think the question is fundamentally unanswerable - mundane nutritional questions like “why are vegetables good for you?” seem like they should be easy to give a response to, but unfortunately the reality is way more complicated.
A word of caution - when things aren’t tested in large trials with clearly important endpoints, we don’t know what we don’t know
There was a time when people thought vitamin A and vitamin E supplementation might prevent cancer.
But 30 years ago, a large clinical trial was published in the New England Journal of Medicine looking at the impact of supplementing these vitamins on cancer incidence:
The study found a suggestion of increased cancer incidence with supplementation and clearly no benefit on cancer risk or risk of dying overall.
That’s why you do large clinical trials looking at hard endpoints - if you don’t study something rigorously, you don’t know whether it works or whether it’s harmful.
I don’t want you to take this point and conclude that I think AG1 causes cancer because they have vitamin A and vitamin E in there - I don’t think that.
But we should be humble about the level of confidence that we can have in any intervention.
There are 75 ingredients in AG1 and even though short term studies looking at soft endpoints are promising, you still have literally zero clue what this means for your health over the long haul.
Maybe it’s great.
Maybe it’s neutral.
Maybe it’s harmful.
If you ask me to commit to an answer, I think AG1 is probably a very small net positive for health for someone who eats a balanced diet, but my level of confidence in that answer is very low.
So, it is worth the money?
I don’t know, and you don’t either.
And neither do the people selling it to us.
I’ve made this joke before, but I think that “end stage influencer” means that you either sell your own supplement brand or advertise for Athletic Greens.
Worth it for you is different than worth it for me - a subjective question is going to get a subjective answer. If I don’t know everything about your net worth, your disposable income, your current health status, your values and preferences, then I simply can’t provide you with useful information to answer that question of “worth it.”
What problem are you solving with a supplement is the high level question that most people need to be asking but aren’t. Taking something for “energy” or to “feel better” is impossible to measure. Even if you have a clinical trial demonstrating that a multi-ingredient supplement is better than placebo at “feeling better” you can’t have any way to sort out whether it’s due to the entirety of the ingredient mix or due to a single aspect of the product.
And thus very prone to being impacted by the placebo effect.
Or getting more of that nutrient through diet.
You could even try to get more meta and ask the question “how confident are we in the premise that vegetables are really good for us?” and end up down a rabbit hole of research from the Weston A. Price Foundation much more confused than when you started.