The battle over AG1—the influencer-famous, $100-a-month green supplement—is coming to a vending machine or grocery store near you

If you listen to podcasts of any sort, chances are you’ve heard tell of the magical properties of AG1, the moss-green powder formerly known as Athletic Greens—probably in the voice of a host whom you like and trust.

Joe Rogan swears by a morning glass of AG1 as “a science-backed solution for energy, focus, and high performance.” On the Pivot podcast, journalist Kara Swisher tells listeners that a daily scoop can “replace a ton of other supplements like [a] daily multivitamin, minerals, and probiotics,” while her cohost, New York University professor Scott Galloway, shares that he takes his “with some yogurt and some coconut milk and a few berries.” The neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, on Huberman Lab, says AG1 makes him “feel better” and contains “adaptogens to help buffer stress.” Over on New Heights, the chart-topping podcast hosted by Jason and Travis Kelce, the football-playing brothers claim the powder is the result of “a lot of testing” and should be the go-to product if you’re “serious about stepping up your health game.”

Mixed with cold water every morning, a 12-gram scoop of AG1’s $99-a-month supplement ($79 if you commit to a monthly subscription) promises to provide easily ingested “foundational nutrition” comprising “75 minerals, whole-food-sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens.” As a voice-over explains in one of the company’s sun-dappled video advertisements showing smiling, athletic people shooting hoops, climbing trees, and cartwheeling through luscious green fields, AG1 is “here to make healthy habits beautifully easy.”

If things go as planned, the zeitgeisty supplement company will soon be a lot more ubiquitous. Already popular among the well-heeled self-optimization crowd—“Huberman husbands,” who follow Huberman's masculine-coded fitness advice, and the Goop set who spied a forest green pouch in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Instagram “fridge tour” in 2023—AG1 is now rolling out to a much broader customer base.

A series of deals and product test runs have already put the nutritional powder in Starbucks drinks and airport vending machines, and plans are in the works to place it in the aisles of sporting-goods retailers and select grocery stores. A TV ad for the supplement ran during the CBS broadcast of the Golden Globes. AG1 tells Fortune it is projecting $600 million in annual revenue for 2024 (up from $150 million in 2021), with a profitable operation.

But even as AG1 is poised to break through on this much larger scale, its meticulously constructed brand image—stylishly understated packaging and sleek shaker bottles; a plucky startup tale; and a formula said by the company to have been developed through rigorous scientific testing—is starting to show cracks.

Beneath the polished mythology a different story emerges, one that includes some unsavory details about Chris Ashenden, the company’s founder and, until recently, its CEO, that have not been reported in the mainstream American press until now: Ashenden’s public backstory skimmed over details of his 2011 conviction and fines for a housing scam targeting low-income New Zealanders.

As for the company’s grand health claims, when Fortune asked scientists and experts about AG1’s “science-driven” formula for “foundational nutrition,” the skepticism was intense. A Harvard Medical School professor and several other nutritionists and health experts described the company’s testing process as falling short of what would be necessary to make such claims.

Even in the sphere of wellness influencers and podcasters that propelled the product’s growth, a split over AG1 is developing. Some, including Bryan Johnson, a multimillionaire tech entrepreneur who is famously on a controversial mission to defeat his own mortality, are publicly denouncing the green powder. “AG1 is an empty promise,” Johnson wrote on the social media platform X in May. Rhonda Patrick, a biochemist and podcast host, has called AG1 “nothing more than an expensive multivitamin.”

The writer and podcaster Derek Beres, who has spent much of his career debunking science and wellness misinformation, has described AG1 as “one of the most egregious players” in a supplement industry known for its sometimes questionable ethics. And several independent journalists have dug into the company’s product, resulting in an investigation published on Substack and a New Zealand podcast series.

To a casual observer, this skirmish on the internet of wellness—a place where dubious health claims abound—over a celebrity-endorsed dietary supplement might seem insignificant or even suspect. (After all, Johnson is an eccentric self-optimizer who sells his own nutritional products, making him a direct competitor of AG1.) But in the lucrative, lightly regulated Wild West of nutritional supplements, reputation is everything: A brand that builds its clout via influencers could lose it the same way.

And what happens in the world of health influencers, like it or not, matters more and more. Increasingly, Americans are looking to wellness gurus for guidance, instead of their own doctors, and the line between pharmaceutical medications (which must go through a rigorous testing process to prove their safety and efficacy, generally a yearslong undertaking that costs millions) and nutritional supplements (whose health claims are largely unregulated) is blurring. Americans’ trust in the pharmaceutical industry and institutional health care is at a historic low, and the status quo looks set to be upended by President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. His nominees to some key health-policy posts share a distrust of the medical science establishment and an embrace of strains of wellness culture.

In response to criticisms of AG1, its CEO, Kat Cole, tells Fortune that the company is a “good actor in the space” that uses peer-reviewed research to create its formula and conducts rigorous clinical studies. “To be clear, I welcome criticism of the space,” says Cole, who took over from Ashenden in July 2024 following a three-year run as the company’s president and COO. “I am very critical of the space as a busy mom and someone who has been supplementing for a long time.”

An origin story missing key details

Founded as Athletic Greens in 2010 by Ashenden, a fitness enthusiast and former police officer from New Zealand, AG1 epitomizes the kind of bootstrapped success story Silicon Valley loves. Ashenden has described in interviews and posts on Medium how, prior to starting the company, he found himself “depressed, in debt $5 million, and living on a friend’s sofa in New York City.” He was also “really sick,” he writes, with “recurrent chronic gut health, immunity, and sleep issues.” Prescribed a battery of expensive supplements by doctors, he decided to create a powerhouse powder that provided the nutritional support of a pile of pills in one single daily scoop, he recalled later in a podcast interview.

In 2010, Ashenden, then 34, was playing amateur rugby and learning Spanish in Argentina when, as he tells it, he had a chance encounter that set him on a new path: He was in a café one day when he “saw this white guy walk in.” That man turned out to be the entrepreneur, author, and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss. The pair became friends, and Ferriss informally advised Ashenden on the development of his blended supplement powder into the product he named Athletic Greens. Ferriss referenced it in The 4-Hour Body, his bestselling book about weight loss and “becoming superhuman,” and later invested in the company.

The Ferriss endorsement rapidly propelled AG1 into the consciousness of the self-optimization community and, specifically, the predominantly male podcast listeners who pore over the habits of influential men such as Rogan and the ultra-endurance athlete Rich Roll, seeking to replicate their success and sculpted physiques.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which supercharged the company’s growth: As people in lockdown sought ways to stay healthy, AG1 became a go-to. By 2021, AG1 boasted $150 million in annual revenue, according to the company, and had secured an illustrious group of investors who doubled as brand evangelists. These included physician, longevity expert, and author Dr. Peter Attia; DJ Steve Aoki; Formula 1 driver Sir Lewis Hamilton; supermodel Cindy Crawford; and actor Hugh Jackman. A second funding round, led by investment firm Alpha Wave Global, raised $115 million, boosting the company’s value to $1.2 billion. AG1’s swift expansion reflects boom times ahead for the global dietary supplement industry: With a market size of $87 billion in 2023, it is projected to grow to $183 billion by 2032.

As AG1 has grown in revenue and prominence, its founder and his story have drawn more scrutiny. It turns out that Ashenden’s original account of his journey to creating the supplement powder left out some key details. Much of that debt he has referenced was from a real estate venture in New Zealand that went awry because, in his telling, he “foolishly never understood the legal nuances” of his home country’s property market. But reporting in the New Zealand press at the time offers more specifics: In 2011, Ashenden was convicted of breaching the country’s Fair Trading Act for running a home financing scheme where he led “vulnerable” low-income clients to believe they were buying homes that, in reality, they were only renting. He was fined and ordered to pay reparations. A separate business he had started crashed during the 2008 financial crisis, he has written. His parents, who had invested in the venture, lost their house and a significant amount of money.

In July 2024, Ashenden stepped down from his CEO role, and the company appointed Cole, a respected food-industry veteran. Ashenden retains his ownership stake in AG1 and is one of the company’s board members, but is no longer involved in any day-to-day operations, a company spokesperson tells Fortune.

AG1 declined an interview on Ashenden’s behalf but shared the following statement from him: “Like most entrepreneurs, I’ve had a career of both successes and failures. I made mistakes and regretful decisions in my early business ventures many years ago, and I faced the legal and financial consequences. I deeply apologize to anyone who was hurt as a result of my decisions. I believe in owning my mistakes and hope others can learn from my experiences as I have.”

But does AG1 work?

For customers shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for AG1’s powder packets, the character of the company’s founder is probably less important than the efficacy of the product. And on that subject, the picture is murky at best. AG1 touts a wide—if somewhat vague—range of health benefits for its sole product. The daily drink promises to make you feel both “sharp and focused” and “calm and relaxed”; boost digestion; support heart health; promote healthy aging; and protect cells from “oxidative stress.”

Reached by Fortune, Johnson says his skepticism of these claims came from testing he did in the laboratory of his own highly quantified body: His efforts to defy aging, which have been covered extensively in the media and cost him $2 million a year, include employing a team of scientists to meticulously track his health and regularly analyze his blood. As with other health interventions he has tried, Johnson says, he did his blood work before and after introducing AG1 into his routine, with the addition of the supplement the only lifestyle change he made between the two tests. “I isolate effects,” he says, “and nothing changed when I started taking Athletic Greens.”

Of course Johnson is just one person. But his online blitz (following his post on X, he posted a video criticizing AG1) came as the broader media and science community had begun to question AG1 and the influencer-led evangelism that has made it such an unstoppable force. Journalist Scott Carney, who has written books on the wellness industry and human evolution, published an investigation into AG1 and Ashenden last year on Substack. He sees parallels between the powder and Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes’s doomed blood-testing startup.

“[Theranos] sold this idea of health, but they didn’t deliver,” Carney says. “I feel like AG1 is the same. They’re selling an idea of health, just like many supplement companies—maybe the entire supplement industry sells this idea of health. Do they deliver? Not scientifically.”

In response to such assertions, AG1 points to its certification by the NSF (formerly known as the National Sanitation Foundation), an independent organization that sets safety standards for food, products, and water. This certification confirms that the product contains the ingredients listed on the label, and that it is free from contaminants and drugs or substances banned in professional sports.

To support the claims that the product is formulated via extensive scientific testing, AG1’s website outlines the company’s three-step approach: a “clinical trial” stage where 30 adults take the powder for one month; an “in vitro” stage where the conditions of the human intestine are re-created in a petri dish to analyze the product’s impact on the digestive system; and an “observational study” phase where 35 adults “assess the self-perceived efficacy of AG1 over three months.” The results, written up by AG1’s in-house team of doctors, scientists, and researchers, appear to leave no room for doubt about the product's efficacy. Outcomes range from significant increases in healthy gut bacteria to the fact that, after three months, 94% of participants in the observational study reported feeling “more calm.” AG1 claims that its approach, when combined with “peer-reviewed literature reviews,” is “setting a new standard in research.”

That statement is viewed with incredulity in more traditional corners of the scientific community. Dr. JoAnn Manson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, questions the rigor of any testing process that involves just 30 participants. “These are very small randomized trials,” she says. “Just as a comparison, we do large-scale randomized clinical trials of many dietary supplements … For a multivitamin, we did a randomized control with 15,000 participants for 11 years to document that there was, in fact, a significant reduction in cancer incidence when taking the multivitamin compared to placebo … That’s what I’m talking about when I say rigor.”

Cole, CEO of AG1, says she also believes that more robust research is necessary in the supplement world, and says the company is on a path to expanding its testing process. “I agree that the supplement industry has got to get way more rigorous in finished research in clinical settings on products,” says Cole. “We have begun that journey. I will be raising the standard and moving it to the next level of even more clinical research on a larger number of people.”

How to read a list of 75 ingredients 

AG1 is not meant to be a replacement for meals, but the company’s promotional materials frequently return to the phrase “foundational nutrition,” proclaiming that “AG1 is leading the Foundational Nutrition movement, providing that solution in one simple, daily, drinkable habit.”

But “foundational nutrition” is no more than marketing terminology, argues Dr. Manson. “One point I want to make is that dietary supplements will never be a substitute for a healthy diet,” she says. “People are still going to have grocery bills if they use this product. Overall, they will be paying less per month having more fresh vegetables and a good multivitamin.”

Another issue Johnson and others have raised is the practice known as “pixie-dusting”—in which expensive ingredients are included in the formula in such tiny quantities that they would be unlikely to have any health effect.

“They market it as a good thing that they have 75 different ingredients,” says Charlotte Martin, a dietitian and author who uses social media to myth-bust popular health trends and has skeptically reviewed some of AG1’s claims. “But the more you think about it, in order to fit 75 ingredients in there, it means that you’re getting pretty insignificant amounts of these individual ingredients in a scoop. They have ingredients in there like spirulina, for example, that have been studied and shown to have certain benefits—but you’re likely getting such a small dose that you’re not going to see a benefit from that specific ingredient.”

Some have pointed out that a significant number of AG1 ingredients’ dosages are not disclosed on the label (49 out of 75), because they are considered “proprietary.” Ubiquitous in the supplement industry, proprietary blends permit companies to keep the dosages of ingredients in their unique formulations a secret, to protect their intellectual property. Skeptics say this can also be a cover, allowing manufacturers to funnel high quantities of cheap, ineffective ingredients into products. Cole adamantly denies suggestions that AG1 would do any such thing. “Under my leadership, quality and research are our North Star and our filter,” she says.

Among the ingredients in AG1 where dosages are listed, some are present in nominal quantities. (The formula contains only 6% of the recommended daily allowance for magnesium and 4% of the protein RDA, for example.) And some dosages wildly exceed the recommended daily amount: AG1 includes 1,100% of the daily recommended amount of vitamin B7, for example, and 467% of the recommended amount of vitamin C. Taking these dosages is not harmful, but both vitamins are water-soluble, Jonathan Jarry, a guest lecturer and science writer at Montreal’s McGill University, pointed out in an article about AG1 published in early 2024—“so if you are getting an excess of them through your diet or your supplementation, you simply pee it out, which increases the financial value of your urine.” A charming thought.

Ralph Esposito, a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist and AG1’s chief science and nutrition officer, says that “several nuances in biochemistry and nutrition” explain why some ingredients in the formula exist in “amounts that may appear higher or lower than the RDA.” He points out, for example, that some studies suggest that a larger daily dose of vitamin C has health benefits.

Also, Esposito says, the amounts of each ingredient in AG1 are carefully calibrated, and the formula relies on all the ingredients working together to deliver results. “We only make claims that are substantiated by scientific evidence,” he says. “While we don’t make claims based on every ingredient in AG1, each plays a synergistic role.”

A loose regulatory structure that’s likely to get even looser

Claims like AG1’s are generally not approved or rejected by government regulators: Federal guidelines are mainly aimed at ensuring a product is safe, not that it is effective. A supplement cannot contain unsafe substances or claim to cure a specific illness—but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not usually have the authority to review a supplement before it goes to market, and it does not assess the substantiation for marketing claims.

Determining the impact of supplements on consumer health is a complicated and unreliable process, given the industry’s lack of regulation. On the one hand, there’s precious little science to support the theory that ingesting small doses of vitamins and minerals in powdered form can “fill nutrient gaps” as AG1 claims. On the other, it’s hard to argue with those who say that AG1 and other supplements improve their energy levels and overall health.

Morgan Smith, a 37-year-old who lives in New York and works at a fintech startup, is one of them. While traditional multivitamins leave her “nauseous,” she tells Fortune, AG1 gives her “better and more balanced energy throughout the day.” She also enjoys the ritual of drinking the same thing every morning and swears by the brand’s travel packs when she’s away from home. “It gives me peace of mind that I’m doing something good for my health,” she says.

The question of whether supplements like AG1 do what they promise is unlikely to be answered in the near future, with the incoming federal health establishment under President Donald Trump looking likely to be far more friendly to dietary supplements and health treatments that have traditionally been dismissed as fringe.

If Trump’s nominees are confirmed, the new administration will be populated by a slew of dietary supplement evangelists. Posting on X before being named by Trump as his choice for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no public health or medical training, criticized the FDA for what he called its “oppressive suppression” of a range of treatments, behaviors, and products, including nutraceuticals, the food- and plant-derived substances that are among the ingredients of AG1. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the surgeon turned TV personality turned nominee to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, has been criticized for promoting dubious supplements on his TV show and social media. Janette Nesheiwat, the urgent care doctor and Fox News contributor poised to be the next U.S. surgeon general, sells her own line of supplements for “immune support.”

The rolling back of already loose regulation of supplements would be a boon for companies in the category and a challenge for customers, says Colleen Tewksbury, an assistant professor of nutrition science at the University of Pennsylvania. “If [regulatory oversight] gets scaled back even further for nutraceuticals, I think there’s going to be more of a market for these products, which could be exciting for additional nutritional research,” she says, “but could be very scary for the general public if we have a lot of products without demonstrated safety.”

Riding the wave of the podcast boom

Arguably, robust science has never been AG1’s chief selling point. Its genius lies in the aesthetic and tone of its marketing: a chic product wrapped in a perfectly calibrated message about optimizing health through simplicity, communicated by a troop of starry brand evangelists. The rise in podcasting has provided a perfect marketing tool for AG1, and the company has become a juggernaut in the sector, with advertisements on a massive range of popular shows.

Podscribe, an analytics platform, found that advertisements for AG1 have been heard on almost 11,000 episodes of over 700 different podcasts in the past two years alone, and that AG1 has spent more than $27 million on podcast advertising since 2022, more than any other supplement brand. AG1 says this estimate is “generally consistent” with its own figures, although the company adds that the majority of its growth is “driven by organic word of mouth.”

The person most closely aligned with the brand, and probably the company’s most vociferous and prominent supporter, is Andrew Huberman. The neuroscientist, Stanford professor, and wildly popular podcaster is a scientific advisor to AG1, which also sponsors his podcast. Huberman has over 7 million followers on Instagram and more than 6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of his podcast recordings, many of which rack up millions of views. An episode on how to “build immense inner strength,” for example, has 17 million views.

Last year AG1 was featured in a prominent takedown of Huberman: “It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan,” wrote Kerry Howley in her March New York Magazine profile. “It is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder ‘covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.’ ”

Huberman did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment. A spokesperson for AG1 said Huberman’s regard for the product is genuine, pointing out that he drank AG1 for a decade before the company began sponsoring his show.

Tushar Jain was one of the many who first heard of AG1 on the Huberman Lab. The managing partner of an investment fund with a self-described “passion for health and longevity,” Jain remembers the neuroscientist waxing enthusiastically in ads on the podcast about how it made him feel better and sleep better, while “it also happened to taste great.”

Jain began gulping down a scoop of the powder mixed with water every morning, and within a few weeks he recalls that he “definitely felt better.” He notes, however, that around the same time, he introduced “a lot of lifestyle changes,” including working out for five hours a week. Then he saw Bryan Johnson’s post on X. Jain was troubled by the points Johnson made, particularly Johnson’s claims about how influencers are paid for their endorsements of the product.

AG1 called Johnson's claims “unsubstantiated and not accurate," and Cole declined to comment on the specifics of the company’s financial arrangement with influencers—but she tells Fortune that the company only partners with podcasters who are sincere in their appreciation for AG1: “Two things can be true,” she says. “Someone can be a genuine drinker of AG1 and genuinely believe in it, and they can be paid for their hard work in building a community and a platform. One does not make the other inauthentic.”

In any case, Jain—in his mid-thirties, with a hefty social media presence and some disposable income—embodies AG1’s core customer demographic. And his disenchantment offers a warning sign for the company, given its growth ambitions: It didn’t take long for him to fall out of love with AG1. Following Johnson’s post and some research of his own, Jain says, he canceled his AG1 subscription.

An aspirational idea

More than any particular formula or outcome, AGI is selling hope: the hope of an easy route to long-term health; the hope that one could look like a celebrity; the hope of a successful, beautiful life.

For busy people struggling just to stay healthy and feel okay, that’s a hard-to-resist pitch, says Martin, the dietitian. “Not only are we completely amazed by celebrities but also, as a society, we just want that quick fix,” she says. “I think most of us know what true good nutrition is—it’s getting back to those basics of fruits and vegetables—but that’s boring, that’s challenging … If there’s a product that offers me 75 different ingredients and claims to tackle my dull skin, give me energy, and help with the digestive issues … why would I not give it a try?”

The appeal of such a simple path to good health may be heightened by a feeling of powerlessness, Carney says: “We have a broken health care system in America … And so people are looking for ways to stay healthy that don’t involve interacting with that system. I just don’t think AG1 delivers the result. It delivers a marketing image.”

AG1 is hardly the first product to be touted by some as a magic bullet for health and dismissed by others as snake oil. But even as supplement enthusiasts ascend to the highest levels of the U.S. government health establishment, the cultural tide may be turning against such ventures, says Aaron Alpeter, the founder of Izba, a supply-chain consultancy that specializes in advising startups. Alpeter believes that consumers and venture investors are tiring of what he calls an “oversaturation of influencers” in the supplement space. “The last 10 or 15 years, it was celebrity-driven … and what I think you’re going to see is a swing the other way, where those brands that have really rigorous scientific backing are the brands people are going to start switching to.”

For its part, AG1 says its future is looking bright. Its test collaboration with Starbucks saw two iced drinks, referred to as “nutritional blends,” on sale in select stores for a period last year. (Starbucks declined to comment on the results of the test or any future collaboration with AG1.)

Additionally, an AG1 spokesperson says, there are plans in the works to sell the powder at premium grocery stores and sporting goods retailers in the near future. “AG1 is profitable and in a very strong position to self-fund its next phase of growth,” the spokesperson says. “We are not seeking outside capital at this stage in our business.”

The heated debate about AG1’s efficacy, its promises, and the influencers who deliver them speaks to a larger tension playing out in America—between a medical and scientific establishment that many see as broken and an alternative approach to health, optimization, and well-being that claims to draw upon both ancient wisdom and modern technology. It can be hard to know what to believe.

Ultimately, downing an expensive glass of green liquid in the morning may not hurt you. But that doesn’t mean AG1 and its marketing machine are harmless, Carney argues.

“They are creating a false sense of hope,” he says. “And by doing that, they are actually weakening the faith we can have in the scientific method.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com