AG1 Review: 42 of Its 77 Ingredients Have No Listed Amount

Search “AG1 review” and you will find two kinds of answer: podcast hosts reading sponsor copy, and long video takedowns. Neither starts where a review should, with the label. So we read the Supplement Facts panel on AG1’s own product page, line by line, on 18 October 2026, checked what we could against the trials, and read the four studies AG1 cites for itself.

What AG1 is

AG1, the company formerly called Athletic Greens, sells several products, but “AG1” in a search almost always means its flagship powder, now called AG1 Next Gen. One 13 g scoop is stirred into water once a day. The product page describes it as a drink that “combines a multivitamin, pre- and probiotics, superfoods, and antioxidants”, and sums up the pitch in one line: “What it replaces: Your multivitamin, probiotics, greens powder, vitamin C, and B-complex.”

That claim is the useful one to test, because it is specific. A product that replaces a multivitamin should cover what a multivitamin covers, and a product that sells adaptogens should contain enough of them to matter.

The label: 77 lines, and 42 of them have no amount

By our count the Next Gen panel has 77 lines:

Part of the label	Lines	Amounts stated?
Vitamins and minerals	24	Yes
Other nutrients (K2, benfotiamine, inositol, boron, CoQ10, alpha-lipoic acid)	6	Yes
Active Superfood and Prebiotic Complex	21	Only the 7.5 g total
Daily Phytonutrient Complex	21	Only the 1.5 g total
Dairy-Free Probiotic Blend	5 strains	Only the total: 37 mg, 10 billion viable cells

The disclosed part is a reasonable multivitamin. Vitamin C is 500 mg, B12 400 mcg, folate 680 mcg DFE as 5-MTHF, zinc 20 mg, half the 40 mg adult upper limit. Some minerals are low by design for a powder: magnesium is 30 mg, iron 1 mg, calcium 120 mg.

The other 42 lines are plants, from organic apple powder and pea protein through spirulina, chlorella, matcha, mushrooms, milk thistle and grape seed extract. They share 9 g between them, and the label gives no amount for any one of them. That is legal, and it is common. It also means that the ingredients AG1 talks about most outside the vitamin panel are the ones you cannot check.

The earlier AG1 formula, still on file in the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database as of a March 2025 entry, was built the same way, with three blends totalling about 10.3 g. The Next Gen formula moved CoQ10, alpha-lipoic acid and vitamin K2 out of the blends and gave them amounts, which is a real improvement.

What the blend rules let us work out

There is one thing a blend cannot hide. Federal labeling rules require the ingredients inside a proprietary blend to be “declared in descending order of predominance by weight”. If AG1’s list follows that rule, the 15th ingredient cannot weigh more than the 14 above it, so it cannot be more than one fifteenth of the blend.

AG1’s FAQ names ashwagandha and rhodiola as the adaptogens it adds “to support energy, mood, and the body’s response to stress”. In the 7.5 g complex, rhodiola extract is listed 15th of 21 and ashwagandha extract 19th. By that arithmetic:

Ingredient	Position in 7.5 g blend	Most it can be (our arithmetic)	Dose in the trial we checked
Rhodiola root extract	15th of 21	500 mg	576 mg a day of a standardised extract (Olsson 2009, 60 adults)
Ashwagandha root extract	19th of 21	about 394 mg	300 mg twice a day, 600 mg (Chandrasekhar 2012)

These are ceilings, not estimates. The real amounts could be lower: apple powder, pea protein and spirulina sit at the top of the list, and the label does not say how much of the 7.5 g they take up. Even at the ceiling, both are below the trial doses, and the extracts are not described the same way as the ones tested.

The disclosed extras sit low against their trials too. Alpha-lipoic acid is 100 mg; the SYDNEY 2 trial in diabetic nerve pain found that “600 mg once daily appears to provide the optimum risk-to-benefit ratio”. Vitamin K2 is 90 mcg; a three-year bone trial in 244 postmenopausal women used 180 mcg a day. Neither of those trials studied AG1’s users, and AG1 does not claim them as its evidence. They show that these amounts are on the low side of what has been tested.

No vitamin D

For a product that says it replaces your multivitamin, the most surprising line on the panel is the one that is not there. AG1 Next Gen lists no vitamin D. The NIH recommended amount for adults aged 14 to 70 is 15 mcg (600 IU) a day, and 20 mcg (800 IU) over 70. AG1 sells it separately, as AG Vitamin D3 + K2, which its menu describes as a complement to AG1.

If you switch from a multivitamin to AG1, you lose your vitamin D unless you add it back.

AG1’s trials: small, company-run, and not about how you feel

The product page says AG1 Next Gen “has also been clinically shown to fill nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels, and enrich the gut microbiome through four gold-standard clinical trials”, and footnotes describe trials of 105, 20, 40 and 16 adults. We searched PubMed on 18 October 2026 and found two of the four:

• Nutrient gaps, 20 adults. A two-week crossover trial in resistance-trained adults found more of their nutrient requirements met on AG1 than on placebo, and that “Vitamins A, C, and E were the most common nutrient gaps filled”. It found “no significant differences in digestive quality of life between groups (p = 0.777)”.
• Absorption, 16 adults. After a single serving, blood levels rose for every nutrient measured except vitamin B6, which is what you would expect of any multivitamin. The paper states that AG1 funded it and took part in its design and writing.

We could not find the 105-person and 40-person trials in PubMed. An earlier AG1 trial, published in 2024 in 30 adults over four weeks, found that AG1 enriched two bacterial species “that likely stem from the probiotics species that exist in the product”, and a digestive quality-of-life change that did not reach significance (p = 0.058). Two further AG1 papers were laboratory models, not people. AG1 employees are authors on every one of these studies.

None of this means the trials are wrong. It means they show what a multivitamin with probiotics would be expected to show: that the vitamins are absorbed, that people who were short on vitamins A, C and E got more of them, and that the probiotic strains turn up in stool.

The figures on the product page that sound most like benefits come from somewhere else. “80% felt digestion improve after two weeks and 85% felt more energy at one month” is footnoted to “a third-party, single-arm, closed label interventional study of 104 healthy adults ages 25-59 assessing self-perceived efficacy”. Single-arm means there was no placebo group; closed-label means everyone knew they were drinking AG1. In the two placebo-controlled trials we could read, digestive quality of life did not differ significantly between AG1 and placebo.

Quality testing is the strongest part

AG1 is NSF Certified for Sport. NSF’s product search listed the AG1 Next Gen family with 23 listings when we checked. AG1’s page says the certification means the product is tested and “free from more than 280 banned substances”. It is a meaningful assurance about contamination and banned substances. It is not evidence that AG1 improves health.

Price and refund terms

On 18 October 2026 AG1’s product page listed:

Plan	Price	Per day
One-time pouch, 30 servings	$99 plus $9 shipping	$3.60, by our arithmetic
Subscription, every 30 days	$79	$2.63, AG1’s figure
Subscription, every 90 days	$207	$2.30, AG1’s figure

The FAQ describes the guarantee this way: “We let you try your first order of AG1 risk-free. You have 90 days to enjoy all the health benefits and make AG1 part of your daily lifestyle.” It applies to the first order, not to later subscription shipments. After opening, the pouch has to be kept in the fridge because of the probiotics.

What we checked on regulators

On 18 October 2026:

• FDA warning letters: a search for “AG1” returned one letter, to an unrelated company in 2021. The same search for “kratom” returned 13, so the search was working. A search for “Athletic Greens” did not load, so we cannot report a result for that name.
• FTC: the FTC’s site search returned an error page, so we could not complete that check.
• Better Business Bureau: the profile for Athletic Greens USA, Inc in New Holland, Pennsylvania showed a B- rating and no accreditation. The reason given was “Failure to respond to 1 complaint(s)”, and the complaint list showed a single billing complaint from 22 August 2024, marked unanswered.

Who might consider it, and what to do instead

If you want one scoop that covers most vitamins and minerals, adds a named probiotic blend and is independently tested for contaminants, AG1 does that, and the NSF certification is worth something. If you dislike swallowing pills, that convenience is real too.

If you are buying it for the adaptogens, the mushrooms or the “superfoods”, the label does not let you see how much you are getting, and the blend arithmetic puts ashwagandha and rhodiola below the trial doses we found. If you are buying it to replace a multivitamin, check your vitamin D. And if you are weighing $2.30 to $3.60 a day, our guide to whether multivitamins work covers who benefits from a basic multivitamin at all. Our upper-limit checker can tell you whether stacking AG1 with other products takes you over a limit.

The bottom line

AG1’s disclosed panel is a solid multivitamin with a probiotic blend, from a company that tests for contaminants. The rest of the 77 ingredients, the part the marketing is built around, sits in two blends with no amounts, and the federal ordering rule puts its headline adaptogens below the doses used in trials. It has no vitamin D. Its own trials are small and company-run, and the “80% felt better” numbers come from a study with no placebo. We do not link to AG1, and nothing on its label or in its trials makes a case for paying $2.30 to $3.60 a day for the parts you cannot measure.