Athletic Greens and Patriot Power Greens are two of the most popular green superfood drinks, though they have pretty different approaches: Athletic Greens targets modern, engaged consumers by making use of health and wellness influencers, while Patriot Power Greens is pretty squarely focused on the baby boomer and senior citizen demographic.
It’s fair to say that Athletic Greens uses a little more science in their approach as well. They’re a company that enjoys discussing the benefits of antioxidants while Patriot Power Greens’s website spends more time simply telling their consumers the product will make them feel like “young bucks” again.
But we digress, we’re here to talk about the ingredients and the benefits. They’re both made from pulverized whole foods and contain a fair share of algae, fruits, and probiotic bacteria, so which is a better pick?
Taste
Athletic Greens
Both of these products taste great, but they’re very different. Athletic Greens tastes fruity, creamy, and gingery. Of all its varied ingredients, it tastes the most like papaya, carrot, pineapple, vanilla, and ginger.
(Check out our full Athletic Greens review!)
Patriot Power Greens
This product comes in berry flavor, which well and truly tastes like mixed berries. Or rather, it tastes like mixed berry flavoring with hints of apple and passionfruit. It’s sweet.
Both of these taste great but I found myself really wanting to savor Athletic Greens. It’s complex, warming, and not too sweet. I preferred it, but they’re both pretty darn tasty.
(Check out our full Patriot Power Greens review!)
Winner: Athletic Greens
Price
Athletic Greens
Athletic Greens gives the best deal when you subscribe to a monthly shipment, which brings the cost to between $70 and $80 per bag or about $2.50 per serving. If you get a one-off purchase the cost will be almost $100 for a bag. That’s pricy, even for a greens powder.
Extraordinarily nutritious greens powder with many potential health benefits. Also one of the best-tasting greens powders on the market.
Patriot Power Greens
With postage and handling, a tub of 30 servings costs between $55 and $65, so it’s abotu $2 per serving. If you buy five cannisters at once, the price drops by about half.
Winner: Patriot Power Greens
Ingredients
Athletic Greens
There are a whopping seventy-five ingredients in Athletic Greens that are divided into four categories: “Alkaline, Nutrient-Dense, Raw Superfood Complex,” which makes up almost 70 percent of the product’s weight, then “Nutrient Dense Natural Extracts, Herbs, and Antioxidants,” “Digestive Enzyme and Super Mushroom Complex,” and “Dairy Free Probiotics.”
They cover the full spectrum of what most people want in green powders: algae, grasses, roots, and herbs. Standouts include astragalus and ginger for immunity, rhodiola and mushrooms for stress, green tea extract and goji for antioxidants, milk thistle for liver health, and 7.2 billion probiotic bacteria from two strains.
Patriot Power Greens
There are fewer ingredients in Patriot Power Greens. Both of these products contain inulin, spirulina, beets, enzymes, spinach, goji, and some fruits, but the ingredients list on Patriot Power Greens revolves mostly around fruit. There’s apple, raspberry, blueberry, cranberry, prunes, pomegranate, passionfruit, orange, and more. There are plenty of vegetables as well, but that’s the bulk of Patriot Power Greens: fruits and vegetables.
When you compare that to the fruits, vegetables, roots, leaves, herbs, and mushrooms in Athletic Greens, it becomes clear that although Patriot Power Greens has more strains of probiotic bacteria (nine of them), Athletic Greens has a better array of ingredients.
Winner: Athletic Greens
Effectiveness
Athletic Greens
So what does Athletic Greens do? As mentioned above, the ingredients are linked to a vast amount of benefits that include improved stress response, liver health, and immunity.
It’s also really high in vitamins and minerals. One scoop contains 700 percent of the RDI of Vitamin C, 332 percent of your Vitamin E, and at least 100 percent of your daily Vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, K2, biotin, and zinc.
When it comes to more clinically proven benefits, it’s true there aren’t a whole lot of studies on greens powders but a couple of them that were published in the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine did find that two different brands of green superfood powders (one was Greens First) helped to significantly lower blood pressure in two groups of people.(1)(2)
Those products used in the studies had ingredient profiles that were a lot more like Athletic Greens (with its wheat grass and barley grass) than Patriot Power Greens, although both products contain chlorella, which a 2014 study in Nutrition Journal found may lower cholesterol.(3)
Patriot Power Greens
Again, there are fewer ingredients and fewer kinds of ingredients in Patriot Power Greens. It’s mostly fruits, vegetables, and probiotics, all of which are healthy but provide fewer benefits compared to a variety of fruits, vegetables, roots, mushrooms, and so on.
If Patriot Power Greens is mostly fruits and veggies, does it at least provide more vitamins and minerals and antioxidants than Athletic Greens? We don’t know, because surprisingly, there’s next to no nutritional information in Patriot Power Greens. We only know it contains 30 percent of your daily Vitamin A and 6 percent of your daily iron, both of which fall short of Athletic Greens.
Unlike Athletic Greens, Patriot Power Greens doesn’t quantify its probiotic content either. This is tricky because while we know that Patriot Power Greens has more strains of probiotics, which is actually important, we don’t know if it has more bacteria in general. Green superfood drinks range from 1 to 25 billion probiotics, so not knowing how many are in a product is a huge problem.
It’s great that they’re present in the product as probiotic bacteria have been linked to everything from lower indigestion to better immunity and possibly even mental health.(4)
In my opinion, Patriot Power Greens has a transparency problem, and it’s hard to recommend something that doesn’t tell you what it does.
Winner: Athletic Greens
Overall Winner: Athletic Greens
The only advantage Patriot Power Greens might have over Athletic Greens is the probiotics, but since I don’t know how many it contains, I can’t be certain. Otherwise Athletic Greens has way, way more vitamins and minerals on offer, it has a wider variety of ingredients, and it appears to be denser with antioxidants. For all these reasons, Athletic Greens is my pick for the better product.
References
1. Zhang, J. et al. Taking nutritional supplements for three months reduced blood pressure but not blood lipid levels in students. J Chiropr Med. 2006 Summer;5(2):53-9.
2. Zhang J, et al. The effect of fruit and vegetable powder mix on hypertensive subjects: a pilot study. J Chiropr Med. 2009 Sep;8(3):101-6.
3. Ryu NH, et al. Impact of daily Chlorella consumption on serum lipid and carotenoid profiles in mildly hypercholesterolemic adults: a double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled study. Nutr J. 2014 Jun 11;13:57.
4. Messaoudi, M. et al. Assessment of psychotropic-like properties of a probiotic formulation (Lactobacillus helveticus R0052 and Bifidobacterium longum R0175) in rats and human subjects. Br J Nutr. 2011 Mar;105(5):755-64.
