Product Review: Gnarly Nutrition (edited)

Guest post by: Sabine Weijers
Twitter: @sabineweijers

Remember the days when protein powders tasted like chalk and were loaded with sugars and additives?
[read: crap] Unfortunately, there are still lots of products out there that are loaded with ingredients you simply just want to avoid, to name a few:

• aspartame
• soy lecithin
• maltodextrin
• corn syrup
• artificial flavoring
• wheat

Of course, there are folks out there that don't care about this, but personally we believe in the motto "eat crap, feel like crap". Also, if you're out there training your a$$ off to be "healthy" or "look good", eating junk kinda defeats the purpose, right?

Luckily, more and more products become available that are free of GMO, soy, wheat, sugars and other artificial additives. Gnarly Nutrition is one of those. Founded in 2012, their goal is to deliver "clean nutrition". We like that!

After sending them an e-mail, they were kind enought to send us some samples to review. We got the following:

Gnarly Whey Chiseled Chocolate

Gnarly Whey Vicious Vanilla

The criteria we are looking for?

1. as little ingredients as possible, AND as natural as possible
2. mixes well
3. tastes good
4. extra bonus: tastes good when mixed with water

Gnarly Whey Chiseled Chocolate - mixed with water

Chocolate

1. ingredients, see picture
2. it mixed well, we used a shaker with one of those mixing thingies
3. taste is good, even though it contains stevia (not a fan of stevia taste)
4. still tastes nice mixed with water (of course not as creamy when mixed with milk for example)

Gnarly Whey Vicious Vanilla - mixed with unsweetened almond milk

1. ingredients, see picture below.
2. it mixed well, we used a shaker with one of those mixing thingies
3. tastes really nice and creamy, obviously it helped using almond milk. Nice smooth vanilla and no nasty aftertaste
4. Second test was with water, all good!

Vanilla

Great, you may say, but still I'm reading things that are hard to pronounce and don't make any sense. Ok, let's have a look at some of them:

- erythritol *
- isomalto-oligosaccharide
- fructo-oligosaccaride
- guar gum
- xanthan gum
- carrageenan gum

* It's known that some people might have trouble digesting erythritol, but the effects are not as severe as the more common used sweetener maltitol.

Our verdict? We like it. A lot. A protein powder should never be used as a meal replacement, but rather as an easy way to consume protein right after a work-out. Your primary nutrient source should be real food, but if to choose a protein powder made from real ingredients, Gnarly is an excellent way to go.






Edit:
After we posted our review, we got contacted by Eli from Gnarly Nutrition, with the following e-mail:

"We are a company that has put alot of thought into the products we create. We want them to be extremely clean and taste good. So in short we are all about integrity. Thus after reading your review I felt like I had to make sure I get back to you and let you know that unfortunately we do have a little bit of Soy lethicin in our product right now. Our next batch we will be switching to sunflower lethicin. It is a small amount that is attached to our whey to make it mix better and it is GMO free. We list it on our packaging under the allergy section and I'm wondering if thats why you missed it. 

Hopefully that small amount doesn't change your thoughts about the product but if it does, I apologize and can only promise that the next go round. It will be gone."

Now we like Gnarly even more!
Go to the Gnarly website to order, use code A100513 
for a 10% discount!


(We didn't get bribed or paid to write this review. If we think a product is shit, we'll write that too. However, if you order through any of the links provided, we'll earn a small commission. With that money, we can keep this blog going. Or buy bacon)