Vegetable Powder: What It Is Good For, and What It Is Not

We sell a vegetable powder, so the useful thing we can do here is tell you what it is not, first.

It is not a replacement for eating vegetables. It is a way of eating more of them on the days you were never going to cook. That is a real and unglamorous benefit, and it is smaller than the marketing around this category suggests.

What dehydration actually keeps

This is the one genuinely interesting fact about green powders, and it is the reason they work at all. Properly dehydrated vegetables keep the large majority of their nutritional value, as WebMD sets out.

What dehydration does not keep is water content, volume and texture, which is precisely why a couple of tablespoons of powder can represent a great deal more vegetable than it looks like. It is also why a powder will never make you feel full the way a plate of food does. The fullness is mostly the water and the bulk, and those are what got removed.

Four things a powder is good for

Days you would otherwise eat none. Most people's vegetable intake is not a smooth average, it is a few good days and several bad ones. The powder raises the floor rather than the ceiling, which is the honest version of what it does.

Fibre, if the powder actually has some. Check the label. Plenty of green powders are mostly extracts and flavouring, with the fibre processed out.

Travel and no kitchen. A pouch works in a hotel room. This is not a small point if you are away a lot.

Not having to clean a juicer. Anyone who has owned one knows this is a real reason people stop juicing.

Two things it is not good for

Replacing meals. A powder is a supplement to eating. If you are using it to skip food, that is a different decision and one worth discussing with somebody qualified rather than with a supplement shop.

Making up for a diet you are otherwise unhappy with. The instinct to fix nutrition with a product rather than with cooking is understandable and it is also the instinct this industry is built on. We would rather say that than sell you the other version.

How to choose one

Four questions, and most powders fail at least two:

1. Does the label list amounts, or only a blend? A proprietary blend with one total weight tells you nothing about how much of anything you are getting. 2. How many ingredients, and in what quantities? Thirty-six things in a small scoop means small amounts of each. That is not necessarily bad, but it is worth knowing rather than reading the long list as strength. We make the same point about Moa, which we also sell. 3. Whole vegetable or extract? Both are legitimate. Only one of them carries the fibre. 4. Will you actually drink it? Green powders mostly taste of green powder. The best one is the one still in your cupboard in March.

What we sell

Giving Greens is the vegetable powder in our range, made by Slenderiiz. It is part of their weight-management programme and works perfectly well on its own, which is how most people we speak to use it.

If you want the nutrition without the powder, the seaweed drink is LIMU Original and the reasoning behind it is in Seaweed 101.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.