Dan Romero on Warpcast

@keccers.eth know anything about this brand? gruns.co https://gruns.co

Farcaster

When I get presented with a question like "do you know anything about this brand" with a link to a health product, this triggers the emergency brake on my focus and redirects it entirely.

Today's asker is Dan Romero wondering: "do you know anything about this brand [Grüns]?

So here we are folks! Let's take a trip and see if Grüns Gummies are worth your cold hard cash (especially in this economy)

What are Grüns?

Grüns are a plant-based gummy multivitamin packed with a broad range of active ingredients. They are completely vegan and contain no animal products or gelatin. Each serving comes in an 8 gummy snack pack that makes them easy to grab and go.

The Gruns are extremely on-trend

You can buy the gummies basically everywhere, and of course they've got a trillion videos in partnership with various influencers (mostly lifestyle) who extol the vitamins' virtues.

Through a combination of organic and manufactured momentum, gummy supplements have been on a generational tear. The people yearn for healthy candy.

Gummies became a widely available option for consumers in 2010, and then exploded in popularity as influencers like Kim Kardashian and Tati Westbrook endorsed the products.

Today, chewables are the most popular way for adults 35 and under to take their vitamins.

The supposedly great thing about Grüns is that it simplifies your stack. As we'll dive into below, they contain so many active ingredients they say they can replace all your other vitamins. This also allows them to simultaneously market their product using the other health trends of the moment, whether it be gut health, greens, mushooms, adaptogens, nootropics, supplements for hair and nails, and so on.

Grüns' product versus Grüns' claims

The claims for this product are truly staggering. There is nothing these gummies will not do for you. They will improve your thinking, give you stronger nails, make you poop better, improve your immunity and aid in weight management. They say they can do so much I feel oddly ripped off they can't find me a boyfriend, too.

Looking at the cheaper low sugar version of the product, what do we actually find?

1. We find a pretty decent, albeit generic, multivitamin.

   1. There's 100% daily value of most essential vitamins, and 25% daily value of a few key trace minerals.

2. There's a lot of sugar relative to the total serving size.

   1. 40% of the product (8g) is sugar. (to their credit, they do offer a 0 sugar option that uses allulose, but it is more expensive.)

3. The ingredients that drive most of the claims on the website are present in very small amounts.

   1. Another 40% of the product (8g) is their ""Core Nutrients Blend" which is comprised of THIRTY different ingredients.

   2. If split evenly between all of those ingredients, that's .27 grams of each ingredient. But of course, we have no guarantees they did that. The breakdown of the blend is not disclosed, and could be majority comprised of just one of the listed ingredients. For the chart above I generously assumed parity.

The company says that clinical studies back the efficacy of the ingredients in their product—but they don't link to any of these studies, probably because if they did it would be blatantly obvious that the doses that have measurable efficacy are nowhere near the amounts present in the product.

• for 41% more gut bacteria...you need significant amounts of prebiotic fiber (5-10g) or targeted probiotic strains

• for 53% cognitive improvement...you need specific nootropic-level dosing

• for 75% free radical reduction...you need high-dose antioxidants

• for 91% skin/hair/nail improvement...you need collagen, biotin, or fatty acids — Grüns does have 100% DV of biotin, but nothing else. I'll give it to them, but I don't feel great about it.

Near total fail. 35,000 research publications support the ingredients in Grüns because Grüns has tons and tons of stuff in it and so there's just a lot of studies related to those lots of things.

There is a Science page on the company's website but all of the "science" it spotlights is related to supplement purity, not efficacy.

Grüns compared to a traditional multivitamin

What can you get for less, was my natural next question.

Grüns costs a whopping $2.14 per day on a subscription plan, and $2.85 per day if you just want to buy them once. My disposable contacts, special contacts made for astigmatics, cost less than Grüns does on a daily basis. To say that this company must be absolutely printing money might be an understatement.

I compared Grüns to the Nutricost multivitamin capsule, which you can buy from Amazon for just under $14. Nutricost's offering comes in about $0.13 a day.

Between the two products, Grüns and Nutricost have 19 nutrients in common out of 22 total, with nearly identical coverage. Vitamin K2 and Biotin are unique to Grüns, and Vanadium is unique to Nutricost.

Between the nutrients they share, the cheaper product has higher dosage of every nutrient, including the trace minerals that Grüns lacks. The capsules are also inherently sugar free, with no sugar substitute needed to achieve that.

The drawback of the capsules is that if you are perfectly adherent, you risk hitting the upper tolerable limits of some of these vitamins—specifically the B vitamins and the selenium.

B vitamins in high doses consistently over time can cause neuropathy. Selenium in high doses consistently can cause hair loss and gastrointestinal distress. If you're stacking supplements and are interested in the Nutricost, definitely watch out given the high potency of this product.

Overall, looking across both products, I think the Nutricost comes out ahead, and not just on price.

Would I buy Grüns?

Hell would freeze over before I bought these. Had I not been asked to diligence this, I would have assumed it was a scam from the start simply because of the egregious number of benefits claimed on the package; I mentally tune out companies like this now all together. When something feels too good to be true, it usually is!