Morning Complete
79.00
Cons
- Proprietary blends are always a sign of a rip-off - WHY HIDE SERVING SIZES?!
- Contains several useless ingredients
- A few hundred milligrams of veg powder will do nothing
- Tiny serving sizes
Review Summary
After doing a detailed review of Morning Complete by Activated You, I have no idea how this gut health supplement has become so popular. Morning Complete combines a bunch of vegetable and fruit powders that do absolutely nothing for gut health. A bunch of fruit and vegetable powders certainly doesn’t warrant $80 a bottle! Yes you get some probiotic bacteria and some prebiotic fiber, but there’s nothing special about the probiotic blend in either composition or dosages, and we have no idea how much prebiotic fiber we get per sering – Morning Complete could just be 90% cinnamon bark, spinach and turmeric. Sound like a good use of $80 to you?
What is ActivatedYou Morning Complete?
Morning Complete is a comprehensive gut health supplement made by Activated You. Activated you produce some of the most interesting supplements in the US right now; their range focuses exclusively on aspects of health that most supplement manufacturers overlook, like bone health and adrenal efficiency.
Morning Complete is sold as a “daily wellness drink” rather than as a specific gut supplement like a probiotic or a prebiotic. The website states that it is for anyone who wants to “start the day on a healthy note”.
According to the website, Morning Complete can:
- Optimize nutrient intake
- Support healthy body weight
- Help with stress management
- Improve mood and well-being
- Promote a healthy gut microbiome
- Help protect the body from oxidative damage
- Help populate your gut with healthy bacteria
Clearly then Activated You Morning Complete is an all-in-one gut supplement.
The question is, does Activated You Morning Complete really do all of this? Does it work? Is it safe? Is it worth the money? Read our detailed Activated You Morning Complete review below and find out!
Morning Complete Ingredients
Take a look at the Morning Complete ingredients list:
Here is a list of the Morning Complete ingredients with doses in case the image fails to load:
- Prebiotic and High FIber Blend – 4.05g
- Green SUperfoods Blend – 735mg
- Metabolic ENhancing Blend – 390mg
- Antioxidant Blend – 100mg
- Sugar Balancing Support – 100mg
- Adaptogens – 55mg
- Cellular Function and Liver Support – 30mg
- Probiotic Blend – 10 billion CFU
As you can see, the Activated You Morning Complete formula is separated into different proprietary blends. This is a major problem for us. Proprietary blends are usually just a way for manufacturers to skimp on the expensive, proven ingredients and to stuff the formula with cheap fillers.
There is no good reason to show ingredients as part of larger blends. The best supplements all give individual serving sizes, so when we see prop blends, we know we’re dealing with a scam.
We’ll now take you through the Morning Complete blends one by one and explain what is in them, what they’re supposed to do, and whether or not they actually work (depending on what the clinical evidence says).
Prebiotic and High Fiber Blend – 4.05g
This blend contains chicory root fructooligosaccharides and cinnamon bark. Fructooligosaccharides are superb prebiotics; they selectively feed your beneficial gut bacteria, promoting them to grow and thrive. Unfortunately, cinnamon bark has no significant effect on gut health, and we have no idea how much of this blend is cinnamon bark and how much is chicory root fructooligosaccharides.
Green Superfoods Blend – 735mg
This blend consists of spinach, broccoli, kale, mulberry leaf extract, alfalfa leaf, barley grass, and berberine.
We don’t need to tell you why this is a ridiculous blend; a few hundred milligrams of spinach isn’t going to make the tiniest bit of difference to your overall health and well-being. Nor will a few hundred milligrams of kale or broccoli. These are foods you should be eating proper portions of on a regular basis; foods that have no real nutraceutical value we might add.
Metabolic Enhancing Blend – 390mg
This blend contains green tea leaf extract, ginger root, white tea leaf extract, turmeric root extract, bitter melon fruit extract, and black pepper.
As with the blends above, the main issue with this blend is the fact we don’t know the individual ingredient serving sizes, and some of the ingredients are useless fillers. Turmeric root extract can be a useful anti-inflammatory (assuming the extract is mostly curcumin), but ginger root is not. How much of the blend is turmeric and how much is ginger is anybody’s guess!
In any case, there is nothing about this blend that is particularly relevant to metabolism. Green tea extract can increase metabolism assuming it is high in EGCG, but we’re already making a lot of assumptions here!
Antioxidant Blend – 100mg
There is absolutely nothing special about Morning Complete’s antioxidant blend. You get some berry extract (not sure what has been extracted exactly), some pomegranate extract (again, extract not stated), and another plant extract that is just 50% resveratrol. Resveratrol is a potent antioxidant found naturally in grapes and other bright fruits. There are far more powerful antioxidants out there, but resveratrol does a good job of protecting your cells from oxidative damage. But you hardly get any resveratrol from Morning Complete; you get 50% of one ingredient in a three-ingredient, 100mg blend. This is very weak by today’s standards.
Sugar Balancing Support – 100mg
The sugar balancing blend is composed of Gymnema sylvestre leaf, fennel seed, and pine bark extract. Gymnema sylvestre has a long history of use in Ayurverdic medicine as an anti-diabetic and anti-obesity agent. Indeed, there seems to be good evidence for this effect. However, using gymnema sylvestre to control blood sugar should be undertaken under medical supervision as the effect seems to be potentially quite strong (source). The addition of a tiny amount of pine bark and fennel seed is not going to make any difference to your blood sugar levels – as though that is even something we want from Morning Complete!
Adaptogens – 55mg
Morning Complete contains “adaptogens” in the form of astragalus root extract, rhodiola rosea extract, and DIM. This is a very peculiar mix of substances for a blend called “adaptogens”.
Rhodiola rosea is a potent anxiolytic. It reduces anxiety acutely and reduces the severity of stress-related symptoms.
DIM is a compound derived from indole-3-carbinol, which is found in cruciferous vegetables like cabbage and kale. It is known to be a natural aromatase inhibitor, which means it prevents the conversion of testosterone into estrogen.
This is a strange blend which, as far as we can tell, has nothing to do with the stated benefits of Morning Complete. Rhodiola rosea is a great anti-anxiety supplement though.
Cellular Function and Liver Support – 30mg
This blend gives us organic aloe vera leaf and milk thistle extract. As with all of the other blends in Morning Complete, this one is a little confusing.
A few milligrams of aloe vera leaf isn’t going to give you any benefits whatsoever; there are aloe vera drinks that contain chunks of aloe vera leaf and they barely affect you physiologically.
Milk thistle is known to protect the liver and improve liver function in peolpe with stressed livers. But with a total blend size of 30mg, we highly doubt you’ll get enough milk thistle from Morning Complete to make a difference. If you think you stand to benefit from milk thistle, buy a dedicated supplement. Most cost $10 and give you 200mg per day.
Probiotic Blend – 10 billion CFU
Finally, we have Morning Complete’s Probiotic Blend. This is actually quite a limited blend by the standards of today’s top probiotics. Activated You give us a handful of common bacterial species, at about half the total serving of the best probiotics on sale today. The exact culture count doesn’t matter too much, but this seems unnecessarily cheap on their part.
Our thoughts on the Morning Complete formula
Is Activated You Morning Complete a good gut supplement? Can the formula deliver on the manufacturer’s promises?
Unfortunately, we don’t think so.
Activated You Morning Complete looks like an extremely over-priced supplement to us, one that is unlikely to do anything it says it can.
The main problem is that most of the ingredients have little to no physiological effects.
The idea that a few hundred milligrams of kale powder, or a few dozen milligrams of milk thistle, or an unidentified berry extract is going to signifciantly enhance your health or performance is just ridiculous.
Just compare the “superfoods blend” to any high-quality greens powder. Instead of the 735mg of basic vegetable powders you get from Morning Complete, high-quality greens powder give you a comprehensive mix of vegetable concentrates, spirulina, chlorella, and highly bio-available antioxidants in 5g servings.
The same goes for the antioxidant blend; instead of powerful antioxidants like pterostilbene or a rich source of anthocyanidins, we get a tiny serving of resveratrol (the basic supplemental antioxidant).
It is like ActivatedYou You have tried to turn Morning Complete into every conceivable supplement, and in doing so it fails to do anything properly!
On top of all this, we have the simple fact that AcitvatedYou has used proprietary blends to disguise their serving sizes – ALWAYS A SIGN OF A SCAM!
If you are looking for a supplement to promote overall good health and performance, then we recommend sticking to a high-quality multivitamin.
If you want to focus on optimizing gut health, and we advise you to do so, then you would get much more out of a high-spec prebiotic than you would from ActivatedYou Morning Complete.
Morning Complete Side Effects
Is Morning Complete safe? Will it cause side effects?
On the whole, we doubt that anybody will experience serious side effects from Morning Complete. The ingredients are largely benign; things like kale powder, berry extract and aloe vera are not going to cause serious side effects for the vast majority of users.
That said, there are still some things to be wary about in the Morning Complete formula.
It is likely that the prebiotic and high fiber blend is largely cinnamon bark. Chicory root fructooligosaccharides are expensive, so if the manufacturer had included a large serving of them, they’d say so! As such, we suspect a lot of that 4.05g is cinnamon. Consuming that much cinnamon in one serving is highly likely to cause digestive discomfort.
Morning Complete side effects are therefore likely to include:
- Nausea
- Diarrhea
- Stomach cramps
We also don’t think Morning Complete is suitable for long-term, daily use. Probiotics are not meant to be consumed every day for prolonged periods of time; you are supposed to use them to re-balance your gut bacteria, and then stop.
Continuing to consume exogenous bacteria species in large quantities on a daily basis will result in an imbalanced microbiome, and the various problems that come with it.
We therefore don’t think ActivatedYou Morning Complete should be advertised as a daily health supplement!
Pricing: Is Morning Complete worth the money?
Is Morning Complete worth the money?
Absolutely not!
A single jar of Morning Complete is priced at an eye-watering $79.00.
There is no way that we could possibly justify paying $79.00 for a supplement that is just a collection of herb powders, a tiny serving of probiotic cultures, and some basic antioxidants. It just doesn’t make financial sense.
By comparison, there are some extremely high-quality greens powders out there that provide far better ingredients than Morning Complete, in significantly larger doses, for a fraction of this price.
The same can be said for multivitamins, prebiotics, and everything else that Morning Complete tries – and fails – to be.
Morning Complete Review Conclusion: Should you buy it?
After doing a detailed Morning Complete review, we are left wondering why this has become such a popular health supplement.
ActivatedYou has tried to make Morning Complete into a “complete” supplement. But in trying to be everything, Morning Complete ends up being nothing.
The Morning Complete ingredients are extremely basic: there’s kale powder, cinnamon powder, aloe vera, green tea; things that don’t exactly scream “high-spec supplement”.
The use of proprietary blends also leaves us suspicious. If ActivatedYou had included a lot of expensive fructooligosaccharide in Morning Complete, why not brag about it? Why lump it together with cheap cinnamon powder? We think we know why, and so do you!
Ultimately, Morning Complete is a poor supplement regardless of what you’re trying to achieve. It is a poor prebiotic, a poor probiotic, and a very poor “superfood” powder.
The ridiculously inflated $79.00 price tag is the final nail in the coffin for us – what a rip-off!
If you’re looking for a supplement to promote overall health, immune system function and performance, a good multivitamin and a high-spec prebiotic will do the trick. Stay away from obvious rip-offs like Morning Complete.
Looking for a gut health supplement that works?
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Johan Theorin is an author, editor, and competitive cyclist. He is the author of most of the content on this website, and he is the site editor. Johan has spent years researching joint health, sports performance and recovery. He is a leading biohacking expert and an experienced physiotherapist.
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