Boost Vs Ensure – Hi everyone, do you want to know about two famous nutritional supplements, Ensure and Boost, designed to help you meet your nutritional needs whenever eating enough solid foods becomes challenging?
Both Ensure and Boost offer various products in numerous forms and flavors, including ready-to-drink shakes, powders, puddings, and snack bars. Still, you want to know which one is healthier than the other.
About Ensure
Abbott Nutrition launched its first ready-to-drink shake in 1973 under the name Ensure, which would later become the name of its nutritional supplement line.
Ensure’s shakes may be divided into the following categories:
Complete, balanced nutrition. This category includes Ensure Original and Ensure Plus, which are meant to help you maintain or gain weight.
Advanced nutrition. This category includes Ensure Enlive, which is intended to support muscle, bone, heart, immune, and digestive health, all in a single shake.
Targeted nutrition. Aside from Ensure Light, a low-calorie shake, this category’s products are mostly designed to help you build muscle. They include Ensure Max Protein, Ensure High Protein and Ensure Plant-Based Protein.
Specialty therapeutic nutrition. This category comprises Ensure Surgery, Ensure Pre-Surgery, and Ensure Compact, which are designed to support your health before and after surgery.
About Boost
Boost is Nestlé’s nutritional supplement brand. It was designed to help people meet their nutritional requirements after turning 50 years old.
Boost has a wide range of products which includes 12 drinks to meet multiple needs. These drinks are categorized into the following
Diabetes. A category with two products that help avoid blood sugar spikes. These are Boost Glucose Control and Boost Glucose Control High Protein.
High calorie. Boost Plus is the brand’s shake that packs the most calories per serving. It’s also a part of the brand’s oncology nutrition division — a supplement for people with cancer.
High protein. This category includes the products Boost High Protein and Boost Max Nutritional Shake, which are designed to help increase or maintain muscle mass.
Specialized Nutrition. Boost Original, Boost Mobility, Boost Men, and Boost Women include this category’s products. They offer targeted nutrition to meet the specific needs of men, women, and people aged 50 and older.
Ensure and Boost are two nutritional supplement brands with a wide range of products designed to help you gain weight, build muscle, or tend to your specific nutritional needs.
Aside from the previous products, both brands offer an additional set of shakes that target very particular but completely different needs. As such, they have quite specific nutritional compositions.
These include Ensure’s Surgery, Pre-Surgery, and Compact shakes, as well as Boost’s Glucose Control, Mobility, Men’s, and Women’s shakes.
Ensure and Boost have multiple nutritionally similar shakes, allowing you to use them interchangeably. However, when it comes to specialized nutrition, their available products — and their nutritional values — differ greatly.
Ensure and Boost benefits
As mentioned before, both brands design their shakes to help you meet your nutritional needs. However, some shakes may be better than others when you have a specific goal in mind.
Best shake for protein
Protein is one of the three macronutrients — along with fats and carbs.
Together they provide your body with energy, but they also possess specific functions. For instance, proteins are the building blocks of the body, and as such, they help build muscle, among other things.
Both Ensure and Boost shakes may help you increase your daily protein intake. Adding their products to your diet may provide you with an additional 9–30 grams of protein, depending on which shake you choose.
If you’re looking to significantly increase your protein intake without increasing your carb and fat intake, either Ensure Max Protein or Boost Max may be your best choice.
Best shake for weight gain
- If you’re looking to gain weight, you need to create a daily calorie surplus, which is achieved by consuming more calories than your body burns.
- The number of extra calories you need to gain weight depends on your age, sex, height, current weight, and physical activity levels.
- Nevertheless, you may use this calorie calculator to get a rough estimate of the calories you’ll need to consume each day. For a healthy weight gain of 1–2 pounds (0.5–1 kg) per week, consume an additional 500 calories per day.
- Still, most Ensure and Boost shakes may help you reach your increased calorie and nutrient needs, with both brands’ Plus options and Ensure’s Enlive shake being the most nutrient-dense choices.
- Note that you’ll be able to achieve a calorie surplus more easily if you consume them with your meals or as a snack instead of drinking them as a meal replacement.
- This is because swapping a full meal with a 350-calorie shake will hardly lead to the extra calories needed.
Best shake for diabetes
Boost offers two ready-to-drink shakes explicitly designed to produce a lower blood sugar response in people with diabetes — Boost Glucose Control and Boost Glucose Control High Protein.
Best shake for older adults
As nutritional supplements specially designed for adults, both Ensure and Boost may help cover older adults’ increased nutritional needs. Deciding which shake is best depends on a person’s particular needs. If the intention is to obtain as many calories and nutrients as possible, Ensure Enlive and Boost Plus may be the best options.
Best shake for children
Both Ensure and Boost products are intended and designed for adults. Therefore, it’s best to look for an alternative among those brands to find a product that fits your child’s needs.
Conclusion
Ensure and Boost have multiple ready-to-drink shakes that may help you increase your protein intake, gain weight, and manage diabetes. Both are also a good choice for older adults. However, they’re not designed for children.
