If you want all the right things in your diet but don’t have the time to plan, prep and maintain it, then a quality meal replacement is a brilliant solution. Here, our expert James Dixon offers his full Huel review to see whether Huel can fuel your healthier lifestyle.
It can be a bit of a nightmare consistently finding time to prep healthy, balanced meals. Though it should be a priority for all of us – it’s about the most profound, most fundamental thing you can do for your long-term health – time is tight in the modern age.
This is where products like Huel can make a huge impact.
Huel is a game-changing meal replacement shake that offers a convenient and nutritious solution for anybody struggling to prep healthy, nourishing food. Full of plant-based proteins and fibres, stacked with essential vitamins and minerals, Huel aims to revolutionise nutrition by providing complete and sustainable meals in preprepared single-bottle servings.
Let’s find out all about it and just how I got on with it during my testing for this Huel review.
Quick Verdict: Thumbs Up Or Down For Huel?
Huel is lovely. I certainly enjoyed taking it. I saved a lot of time without having to sacrifice my health (though I did personally miss cooking – a quirk of mine). Huel gives you a convenient and nutritionally complete meal without any of the fuss or bother of having to cook.
I would never recommend relying on it solely as your only food source. However, using Huel for a meal or two every day should be great. With its plant-based ingredients, customisable flavours, and commitment to sustainability, it offers a positive alternative for anyone looking for a balanced and convenient way to fuel their bodies when time is a little tight.
What is Huel?
Huel is a brand that specialises in creating nutritionally complete food products. It was founded in 2015 with the aim of providing a convenient and sustainable solution for anybody looking to maintain a balanced diet without having to worry about meal prepping, cooking, or coming up with dozens of recipes for complete nutrient intake.
Huel offers a range of powdered food products that can be mixed with water or other liquids to make up meal replacements, including ready-made bottles of nicely flavoured shakes.
Huel products really focus in on nutrition as their main priority. Each of its meals is designed to give you all the essential nutrients your body needs, including proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fibres, vitamins, and minerals.
It really is very, very clever. Huel carefully mixes its ingredients to make sure that you can meet your daily nutritional requirements without the need for any additional supplementation. Technically, you could live on Huel shakes and nothing else and still be very healthy (physically healthy, that is – you may be crying out for some soul food after a while!).
Huel also places a great deal of emphasis on sustainability. They go in for the use of plant-based ingredients and try to minimise food waste by creating products with a long shelf life. I certainly benefitted here – I often find myself throwing away a few bits at the end of every week as vegetables go off in my fridge, and so on.
Huel also prioritises ethical sourcing and ensures that its products have a low environmental impact.
Huel is pretty much perfect for the more health-conscious, as well as for anybody looking to lose weight in a relatively safe manner – though I would recommend mixing real food in there, as you will need to learn portion control if you’re to maintain a healthy weight at the end of it.
Huel is a great brand, a truly revolutionary one in a marketplace filled with pretenders. It offers nutritionally complete food products with a focus on sustainability and convenience. It gives you an almost perfect way to stay on top of your health and maintain a balanced diet, no matter how busy you might be.
Benefits of Using Huel
As you might imagine, there are some really quite profound benefits to using Huel in your day-to-day life. I certainly found them rolling in thick and fast when I recently tried it out for a decent period.
These benefits include, but are far from limited to:
Convenience
Huel offers a quick and easy meal replacement solution for anybody with busy schedules or limited time for meal preparation. Its powdered form allows for easy storage and transportation, making it convenient to take and use on the go.
Nutritional completeness
Huel is incredibly well balanced, designed to provide all the essential nutrients your body needs. It gives you a wide range of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fibres, vitamins, and minerals – all that you need, really, for optimal health and wellbeing.
Using Huel as a part of your diet can help ensure you receive adequate nutrition, which can be especially helpful for anybody following a restricted eating plan.
Customisation
Huel can be personalised to suit your own very individual preferences and dietary needs. You can add different flavourings or blend it with other ingredients to create various meal options. This flexibility will allow you to enjoy a diverse range of flavours whilst still reaping the benefits of Huel’s stellar nutritional profile.
Sustainability
As we’ve seen, Huel emphasises sustainable practices. This makes it an almost instant win for me. By using plant-based ingredients and minimising food waste, and by reducing the use of animal products and adopting environmentally friendly approaches, Huel promotes a more sustainable food system, ensuring your own personal environmental impact is greatly reduced.
Weight management
Huel isn’t necessarily a weight loss tool. However, it can be used as such. It represents a great aid for weight management, due to its controlled calorie content and balanced macronutrient profile.
It should help you to stick to a calorie deficit or set maintenance target without you missing out on any vital nutrients – though it should never be used as a sole food source, but rather as a supplementary one.
Huel ingredients
Huel gives us several recipes, meaning that there is no one single ingredients list. Each is different. However, there are some common themes that all of their products bring to bear.
For example, the main ingredients in Huel shakes will always include a combination of plant-based proteins, carbohydrates, healthy fats, fibres, vitamins, and minerals. These ingredients work together to create a nutritionally balanced meal each and every time.
Plant-based proteins are an essential component of Huel. Common protein sources found in Huel include pea protein, rice protein, and oat protein. These give you the necessary amino acids that your body needs for muscle growth and repair, making it perfect for anybody living a more active lifestyle.
Huel uses high-quality carbohydrate sources, too, including complex, healthy forms like oats and tapioca starch. These carbohydrates provide sustained energy throughout the day, whilst also helping you to maintain even blood sugar levels. This will go a long way to helping anybody looking to lose and/or maintain bodyweight.
The fat sources are all healthy, too, with sources like flaxseed, sunflower oil, and coconut oil added to Huel recipes to give you the essential fatty acids you need and to promote satiety.
Soluble tapioca fibre and inulin are often used in Huel, meaning healthy fibre in every drink. Fibre is crucial for maintaining healthy digestion and promoting feelings of fullness, making it a must-have in any health eating plan.
Huel is also fortified with a wide range of vitamins and minerals. These include – but are far from limited to – vitamin B12, vitamin D3, iron, calcium, iodine, and zinc. These help to compensate for any potential nutrient gaps in your diet, especially if you’re following any kind of restricted eating plan – and will bolster your overall health and wellbeing.
Do note that Huel uses flavourings to enhance the taste. However, these are all from natural sources such as cocoa or vanilla – Huel typically avoids using any kind of artificial additives.
Using Huel
I used Huel for six weeks running up to writing this article – though it’s not the first time I’ve used it. I’ve always loved it for its convenience, which I’ve relied on at times when I’ve had a lot on and can’t get into the kitchen as much as I’d like. I know I’ve always got something good and nourishing to turn to – something complete.
That’s because this nutritional completeness is incredibly impressive, a really hard feat to pull off. Each serving contains all the vital nutrients my body needs, including proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fibres, and essential vitamins and minerals. It has always given me peace of mind, knowing that I am getting a well-rounded meal with every Huel shake.
You get a good deal of customisability with Huel, too. Things needn’t get tired. The vanilla flavouring is already delicious on its own, but I have experimented by adding fruits, nut butters, or even a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg to create a good range of tastes.
By incorporating Huel into my daily routine, I was also able to easily maintain a calorie deficit, which I kept up for the full six weeks. It helped me to get through 2.5 kg (or around 6 lbs) really easily. The balanced macronutrient profile kept me feeling satiated for longer, curbing unhealthy snacking urges.
I am also a great fan of Huel’s commitment to sustainability. In general, I won’t buy a product that isn’t sustainable. I need to know that the products I consume are ethically sourced and have a low environmental impact, which Huel’s plant-based shakes all do.
And, importantly, I felt good taking Huel. I had plenty of energy, always felt full, enjoyed taking it, and could train and work as hard as I wanted without going hungry or losing drive. It was great.
Verdict
Huel offers a convenient, customisable, and nutritionally complete way for anybody looking to optimise their nutrition and overall wellbeing to do so near enough effortlessly. With a wide range of plant-based ingredients, Huel gives you a balanced combination of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fibres, vitamins, and minerals in one easy-to-prepare meal replacement option.
It is incredibly convenient – all the work is done for you, and its powdered form allows for easy storage, transportation, and quick preparation. It tastes lovely, makes you feel great, keeps you healthy, and gives you everything you need.
Honestly, I can’t think of much to complain about.