Comment · Thu, June 4, 2020
Greens Powders
Original post in this thread
TheOptimizzzer · 12 points
u/misteryouaresodumb I don’t think the possibility of a greens powder from ND/Natrium has ever been mentioned, but curious if this has been discussed at all? Have you used any of these products in the past? Would be interested to know how some of the leading brands test in terms of accuracy of ingredients given how many ingredients these often list. Thanks!
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
When you say greens, what do you mean by that? I see a lot of these superfood greens shit on the market, with like 25-100 things in them. I can tell you right now there is no way they are properly testing all those ingredients, and there is no real way to test the assay of the finished product to see if it contains what they state. You can pick a few marker compounds to see if those meet specs, like zinc, manganese, vitamin D, iron, calcium, etc. You cannot determine that it barley grass, beet root, and broccoli powder in the amounts they state. The chromatography on that would be an absolute mess! You could get the nutrient levels, and assess the likelihood of it being accurate that way. Then you could look for contaminants like heavy metals and residual solvents. That would at least tell you if the main nutrients are in there in the levels stated, and whether or not there are harmful contaminants. However, those nutrients could have been added in from cheaper sources synthetically, and they just add green shit in there to make it look like it contains all those other plants. These methods would also take hundreds of man hours to develop.
For the B vitamins, they are all water-soluble except for folic acid and riboflavin, so you would do a water extraction for those and filter out the rest. For the proteins, you would have to do something called the Kjeldahl method, which converts all the nitrogen in a sample into ammonium sulfate with sulfuric acid. Then you alkalize the solution, and measure the resulting ammonia by distilling it into a measured volume of standard acid. Then you use titration to determine total proteins. You are not measuring the proteins themselves, as that is very difficult chemistry. You'd have to do a lot of validation to ensure that nothing else in there is screwing those numbers up. Other nitrogen-containing compounds will throw it off. The minerals and stuff are easy, as that is just ICP-MS. Some of the products out there have "alkalizing blends" in them. Those would be pretty much impossible to verify, as would the claims for enzymes. You can forget about HP-TLC to determine which plants/extracts are in there. The plates would be a fluorescent mess. If there were specific marker compounds unique to those extracts, like cordycepin in cordyceps, then you could get some data on those. However, most of the plant extracts used in these green superfood combos don't have unique enough marker compounds to make that viable.