The Lyfe Fuel Daily Essentials Shake is among the most healthy meal replacement shakes, containing heaps of nutrient-dense ingredients and plenty of vitamins and minerals. Unfortunately, like other shakes that focus heavily on the health benefits of using a multitude of ingredients, besides being healthy it isn’t a particularly good meal replacement shake. It definitely doesn’t get a spot on our best meal replacement shakes list.
This is because it lacks a properly balanced macronutrient profile and each serving has too few calories to keep you full and fuelled throughout the day, especially if you live an active lifestyle or spend a lot of time in the gym working on your physique.
The Daily Essentials Shake from Lyfe Fuel will ensure you don’t suffer any deficiencies and it contains a reasonable amount of protein to contribute towards muscle growth, but you will need plenty of actual food in addition to this meal replacement shake in order to get everything you need. It lacks healthy fats and fibres that keep you feeling full and give you fuel to undertake more strenuous activities.
Positives:
- Lots of healthy, natural ingredients packed into one shake.
- High in protein powders.
- All the vitamins and key ingredients you would expect.
Negatives:
- Low in calories: 210 calories does not constitute a meal (unless you are running a temporary calorie deficit to lose weight over a short period of time).
- Low in dietary fibre and healthy fats, which will lead to cravings and hunger pangs.
- Falls short of the competition in terms of overall macronutrient balance.
What is the Lyfe Fuel Daily Essentials Shake?
Aimed at “high-performing humans”, Lyfe Fuel’s Daily Essentials Shake claims to be able to keep your body working at its peak throughout the day by providing the exact nutrients you need without all the hard work of meal preparation. The name, Lyfe, is actually an acronym that stands for: Live your fullest everyday.
The Essentials nutrition shake is made from plant-based ingredients and is designed with weight loss, healthy living, and maintenance of energy levels in mind. With 32 whole food ingredients packed into each shake, and no additives whatsoever, the Daily Essentials Shake is great for a clean food, vegan lifestyle.
As well as aiding with weight loss, Lyfe Fuel claims the shake provides numerous health benefits, including having anti-inflammatory properties, reducing stress, improving immunity, boosting bone density, and rectifying blood sugar levels.
While this all sounds great, how much of it is true? In this Lyfe Fuel review, we’re going to dig deeper and find out.
The short version is this: the Lyfe Fuel Daily Essentials Shake is healthy and contains great ingredients, but the macronutrient mix, combined with low calories per serving, means this shake won’t keep you full and could lead to more cravings rather than less due to the extremely low levels of dietary fibre per serving.
Lyfe Fuel Ingredients
The Lyfe Fuel Daily Essentials Shake contains 32 ingredients divided into seven blends: the metabolic and weight control blend, the balance and vitality greens blend, the super-berry blend, the essential micronutrients blend, the longevity blend, the digestive blend, and the detoxification blend. The food ingredients are derived from whole foods, though none of the ingredients are from organic sources (by comparison, Ka’Chava shakes, which are similar to the Daily Essentials shake, are organic and are roughly the same price per meal depending on the purchasing option you choose).
Portion Sizes
A portion of Lyfe Fuel Daily Essential Shake is a 33g scope. This differs from similar types of shakes that typically use higher scope sizes. For example, Ka’Chava, which is included on our best meal replacement shakes list, has a serving size of 60g. In order to allow for a proper comparison, we’re going to assume that each serving of Lyfe Fuel is also roughly 60g. This way we can determine whether Lyfe Fuel is comparable to Ka’Chava.
Calories
Each 60g portion of Lyfe Fuel contains 220 calories, 20 calories less than Ka’Chava. For someone living an active lifestyle or regularly training, this number of calories constitutes a very low-calorie diet. This might be beneficial in the short-term if you’re running up a calorie deficit while focusing on weight loss, but it won’t make you a “high-performing human”. You’re more likely to be a slightly sleeping, lethargic human-albeit an increasing lean one!
Ingredients
Calorie considerations aside, let’s review the ingredients included in each of the blends featured in the Daily Essential Shake and find out what they do:
Metabolic and Weight Control Blend: Organic brown rice, yellow pea protein, tapioca fibre, and flax seed are combined to provide protein, fibre, and high-nutrient carbohydrates.
Balance and Vitality Greens Blend: A host of greens, including kale, broccoli, parsley, cabbage, spinach, and oat grass, provide an immunity boost and ensure balanced blood sugar levels.
Super-Berry Blend: Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, tart cherries, cranberries, and elderberries comprise the Daily Essentials’ super-berry blend. They provide a metabolic boost, improve cell regeneration, and contribute to healthy, glowing skin.
Essential Micronutrients Blend: There are 27 vitamins and minerals, including vitamin E, vitamin D, vitamin C, and a host of other key vitamins, along with magnesium, zinc, potassium, and niacin. There is also a huge dose of vitamin B12, an important addition for anyone following a plant-based diet. The essential vitamins and minerals blend contributes to total body wellness and mental clarity.
Longevity Blend: Focused on reducing inflammation and boosting antioxidant levels, the longevity blend includes pomegranate seeds, grape-seed extract, and co-enzyme Q10.
Digestive Blend: A combination of prebiotics, probiotics, and digestive enzymes, this blend includes lactobacillus acidophilus, lactobacillus plantarum, and bifidobacterium breve, all of which are natural ingredients found in whole foods. Together, they improve digestion, increase nutrient absorption, and boost your immune system.
Detoxification Blend: A collection of sea-grown vegetables make up the detoxification blend, including spirulina, sea kelp, and dulse. Known to boost energy levels, correct cholesterol imbalances, and remove toxins, these are powerful ingredients.
Macronutrients Overview
Now that we know what is in the Daily Essentials shake and why, let’s consider the macronutrients. In other words, when considering these individual ingredients as a whole, what benefits do they provide?
According to the nutritional fact sheet provided by Lyfe Fuel, each portion (and again, we’re doubling it here) of Daily Essentials shake contains 4g of fat, 12g of carbs, 2g of fibre, 6g of sugar (of which 3g are added sugars), and 36g of protein.
The Daily Essentials Shake contains a whole lot of protein-derived from vegan protein powders-but not much fat or fibre. The overemphasis on protein and the lack of fats is probably how the calories are kept so low, but it doesn’t bode well for overall performance. The problem with the ratios here is that fats and fibres are needed in meal replacement shakes to help you feel full and prevent cravings. No fats and fibres and you’re likely to start feeling hungry again just moments after having your Daily Essentials shake.
The high protein is great, but you might as well call this a multivitamin protein shake. It might even make a good post-workout shake or a recovery shake, but not a meal replacement drink.
Lyfe Fuel Flavors and Taste
A recurring problem with meal replacements, particularly plant-based ones, is the taste. The Daily Essentials shake comes in two flavors: vanilla chai flavor and chocolate. It does contain natural sweeteners and added sugar but it still doesn’t have a good taste. Mixing it with almond milk, oat milk, or another plant-based milk is better than just water.
That said, the flavor is comparable to other daily shake products and protein powders and in our review of customer reviews, we did not find an especially high volume of critical comments regarding the flavor. There are always some people that don’t like the taste of a particular shake.
Lyfe Fuel Conclusion
Lyfe Fuel’s Daily Essentials shake can definitely be part of a healthy lifestyle and can help you lose weight if used in combination with other products. They contain plenty of nutrients, vitamins, minerals and the taste is acceptable to most people. You may even experience increased energy when using the Daily Essentials shake, caused by having high doses of all the nutrients taken from whole foods in your diet, as they claim you will. But it is unlikely that the Daily Essentials shake will work as well as other, better meal replacements.
The Daily Essentials shake makes a great low-calorie, nutrient-rich protein shake, but it lacks the fat, fibres, and calories of a pro meal replacement. If you living an active healthy lifestyle or are regularly working on your physique in the gym, then you’ll need more than this shake can offer. An option might be to combine the Daily Essentials shake with one that offers a more complete macronutrient profile, such as Instant Knockout Complete. But then again, Instant Knockout Complete contains a similarly impressive vitamin and mineral mix that makes using the Daily Essentials shake pretty unnecessary.
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