Looking for more information about certain Huel Greens ingredients

1

Loyal Huel user here - well over 5000 meals in.
Been waiting for a product like Greens for years and am excited to try it (fingers crossed it doesn’t make me puke, lol)

However, I find myself wondering if many of the ingredients have been included on marketing, rather than nutritional or scientific grounds. This would be disappointing if so, and discordant with what I’ve come to know and love about Huel’s underpinning philosophy as a brand. A brief caveat; I do understand that the nature of the science (or lack thereof) surrounding certain ‘superfoods’ leaves Huel inescapably open to interrogation on this front. But it has launched a product, so I think it’s fair to request some more information, and in greater detail, about some of its ingredients.

Huel Greens contains many, many ingredients of which the efficacy of their daily supplementation rests entirely on quality/quantity factors, the likes of which Huel necessarily has both access to and control over.

So instead of going through each and every one of them in this thread, I will take just one as an example - Lion’s Mane - and hope that the team can go some way in extrapolating points similar to those that I have raised here about Lion’s Mane onto those other ingredients which require consideration of a similar nature (this at the very least refers to the bulk of the included adaptogens)

The available literature indicates that Lion’s mane as a daily supplement can ultimately be one of two things:

  1. Likely ineffectual / useless
  2. Likely effectual / useful

There are essentially two factors which determine which of those two categories any given Lion’s Mane supplement falls into;

a) quality (amongst other things; the presence of a full spectrum of key bioactives [such as beta-glucan and triterpenes] due to dual extraction processes [alcohol + hot water])
b) quantity (requisite amount of said bioactives per serving)

A huge quantity of Lion’s Mane supplement products on the market are likely useless since they do not meet either standard, and contain fillers and additives to make up weight. It seems to me that these exist either exclusively as a marketing ploy, or due to manufacturer naivety. Furthermore, third party test reports indicating % of bioactives per serving is generally offered by companies selling useful supplements, and not by those that sell useless ones (for obvious reasons).

So my questions to Huel’s team -

1/ Given such adaptogens as Lion’s Mane have been included in Huel Greens, can you give us consumers a run down of their quality and quantity which is at the very least comprehensive enough to indicate whether their presence in the product is likely effectual or ineffectual?

2/ Can you provide third party test reports indicating appropriate extraction methodology and suitable levels of the key bioactives?

If the answer to either of the above is ‘no’ (perhaps for reasons relating to limited resources such as time and/or budget) then could you please explain how it could be argued that the inclusion of certain ingredients (for which the above discussion is pertinent) has been done on anything other than cynical marketing grounds?

I’m genuinely sorry if this sounds overly accusatory. It’s just that I’ve read a number of your replies in other threads on here and it seems as though the product is primarily geared towards basic nutrition, which is totally fine in and of itself, but since adaptogens like Lion’s Mane are in no way uniquely nutritious other than the bioactivity they offer under certain conditions, then one has to wonder why they would be included on nutritional grounds where said conditions haven’t been met, if not (I would say somewhat cynically) to appeal to those who have heard of the unique benefits of such supplements?

I really hope I am proved wrong, and thanks for reading this long post.

Tl;dr : are the adaptogens included in Huel Greens actually going to provide the benefits they are capable of doing, or have they just been included for their fashionable names?

4 Likes
2

Not sure what Huel can or will actually tell you but interested to see how they feedback on it. Adaptogens is a buzzword now…they often aren’t cheap and without a lot of research, establishing their efficacy is tricky.

3

I’m not sure you’lll get much more information other than what is in this guide but it at least cites references for the some of the claims.

4

Hello! In regards to your second question about testing, unfortunately all of our test results are proprietary information so we are unable to share them at this time.

5

Hi @Rafi_Clang

Fair points, thanks for raising.

I’ll respond to this:

1/ Given such adaptogens as Lion’s Mane have been included in Huel Greens, can you give us consumers a run down of their quality and quantity which is at the very least comprehensive enough to indicate whether their presence in the product is likely effectual or ineffectual?

I’m not sure I fully understand what you’re asking but I’ll have a bash … Quality - we source the highest quality mushroom and adaptogens and, the form they are in, there are no carriers: i.e. as an ingredient, it’s 100% pure. However, they are part of an adaptogen blend that contains the other mushrooms (cordyceps militaris, cordyceps sinesnis and reishi).

There are a lot of ingredients to fit into one 15g serving of Huel Daily Greens, and if you were looking to reap the clinical benefit from a single adaptogen alone, then you’d be better off buying, say, a lion’s main supplement. However, this applies only to the adaptogens, and for many of the vitamins and minerals the dose is signifcant.

6

Hey James, thanks for the reply and apologies again if I’m coming across as a little confrontational because I do have a great deal of gratitude and admiration for what you have accomplished and are able to offer with the Huel product range.

However… adaptogens are practically by definition only desirable for consumption because of their biologically active compounds - ie their clinical benefit - and not because of their vitamin and mineral content. You have conceded that a serving of HDG contains sub-clinical doses of adaptogens. So the question remains as to why they have been included and I’m struggling to see that this has been done in good faith, though I remain genuinely open to being convinced otherwise.

I would also add that I fully recognise these same points could be raised for a lot of HDG’s competing products like AG1 etc (ie, that the inclusion of adaptogens is possibly a little cynical since they are at ineffectual doses and may as well not be in there if it wasn’t for the fact it makes more people buy them for ‘hype’ reasons)

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? Am I being unfair or otherwise missing some important detail here?

2 Likes
7

I’m trying to understand the effectual/ineffectual thing. Surely it’s not so binary is it? I mean if Lion’s Mane has benefits for health because it contains certain biologically active compounds won’t it always be beneficial? - ie to a greater or lesser extent depending on the quantity/quality. Thus even a very small quantity of it will be better than none, and as much as can be included in a 15g serving will be useful, and not ineffectual even if its effect is only very small.

Or has science defined what constitutes an ‘effectual’ measure? If such a definition exists then it’s reasonable to ask if DG contains that amount or more, but I expect there’s no such thing.

I trust that Huel wouldn’t include an ingredient just to have it listed in the marketing whilst knowing that it’s useless. That would indeed be cynical. It’s much more likely that they’ve included as much Lion’s Mane as can fit in the serving and as can fit with the manufacturing budget, and whatever the actual amount they’re confident that there will likely be some health benefit.

8
1 Like
9

I asked a similar question on the original greens thread, though I didn’t express it as clearly or thoroughly as you have. I essentially asked are they there in big enough doses to be effective
The answer I received was similar and it seems from James’ responses that the clinically effective ingredients are all vitamins and minerals.
There was some discussion that the dosing of these was higher and possibly better than a multivitamin tablet. But that was it.