Rich Piana 5% Nutrition REAL CARBS Review: Legit Food-Based Carbs!

Bonus points to anyone who puts this at their girlfriend/wife’s eye level in the pantry. Nothing says ‘I Love You’ like a bucket of amazing carbs with Rich Piana staring at you in the morning!

I’ll admit it – sometimes I’m just lazy when it comes to food. There’s absolutely no good excuse for this when it comes to carbs — after all, bulk cooking brown rice or baking sweet potatoes is completely painless. Oats are even easier.

But sadly, there are times when I’m sitting here working and am literally too impatient to want to wait for a microwave to ding and re-heat my carbs. Or sometimes, I just want to add some clean carbs to my protein powder after a rough workout.

So when Rich Piana launched the REAL CARBS carbohydrate “supplement” under his 5% Nutrition product line, many of us said “Finally! It’s about time someone did this!”

Details below, but first we interrupt this program to allow you to check prices and sign up for price alerts:

PricePlow’s Updated Real Carbs Review

The new formula is out, and the guys go back and forth. Mike approves – you can’t argue that this is a legit whole food carbohydrate supplement with quality, non-wheat based carbs!

PS: If you agree with Mike and want some ACTUAL easy carbs, drop a comment in the video above!

What is Real Carbs?

The ingredient label. Click the image to zoom in, or click here for the real label.

Put simply, it lives up to its name: Rich Piana’s carbohydrate food supplement here is made from real food – 10g sweet potato, 10g pounded yam, and 7g of oats, to be exact.

On top of that is blueberry fruit powder for the antioxidants and flavoring support (possibly only in the blueberry cobbler flavor that I have here). It’s got some anti-caking agents and sucralose is used as a bit of additional sweetener, and that’s it.

So what you get is 20g of carbs (1g of which are sugar, 1.7g are fiber) in a 30g scoop. This makes for 100 calories.

Note: the sweet potato pie flavored version has 21g carbs, a slightly better deal!

The question is, how does this taste? Nobody’s ever sure what to expect with a new supplement like this.

Disclaimer!

Before I begin, I will say that I was shipped this container for free, not from Rich Piana, but from IllPumpYouUp.com’s own stash. That never influences a review here – I’m being dead honest when I say how much I love this stuff here:

Mike’s Real Carbs Review

This is about what a 30g serving should look like on the epic Real Carbs shovel. A bit heaping!

Starting with what’s most important:

• Taste: 9/10

  As you can see in the pictures, I’m nearly done with this tub, and it’s one of those supplements that only gets better – you start really looking forward to it.

  As I write this, there are now two flavors — blueberry cobbler and sweet potato pie. I have the blueberry cobbler flavor.

  The first time drinking this, two things hit me right off the bat – this is sweet (not surprising given the sweet potato ingredients), and the taste of some kind of spice like nutmeg in there. I’m probably wrong about the exact spice, but there’s definitely a little ‘zing’ in here.

  Whatever the spice/flavoring used, it’s absolutely incredible from start to finish.

  The blueberry flavor is also there, but I don’t think it’s too strong – I’d love to know what the sweet potato pie tastes like for comparison, but I don’t know. I know that I’d definitely pay for another tub of blueberry cobbler.

  Bonus: This Dominates Greens Powder!

  

  I’m a bit low into my tub bucket, and it’s stayed super dry and powdery. Scoops away!

  The craziest thing with this flavor is that it is the only supplement I’ve ever had that can really overwhelm a scoop of greens powder / vegetable without a lot of work. Normally I need to add a bunch of cinnamon or peanut butter to cover the green nastiness of greens powder. Rich Piana’s REAL CARBS takes care of it with no problem!

  What’s this mean? If you add a scoop of vanilla protein powder, some greens powder, and some berries… you have an actual legitimate meal replacement powder, and a crazy number of servings to boot! Half of this tub was used in that capacity.

• Texture: 8/10

  

  You can see oats floating around, so you might think the texture deserves a lower rating… but we think that this is the best way to handle oats!

  As you can see from the pictures, this is not a 100% smooth mix. There are oat bits here. That might turn you off, but I think it’s the best move.

  Have you ever blended a bunch of raw oats in a smoothie, to realize that they get very grainy and “sawdusty”? They never seem to properly pulverize to something that’s smooth, at least not for me. Because of that, I usually get annoyed with them in smoothies / homemade weight gainers.

  But because 5% Nutrition left these a bit more in their raw form, you don’t have as much of that graininess here. So, it may look odd, but it is the best call with the ingredients, and well worth it.

  The odd thing for me is that I do catch myself “chewing” this liquid a bit before swallowing it. I’m fine with that because it tastes great. Not sure if that’s important, but I figure I’d mention it.

• Convenience: 10/10

  It seriously doesn’t get any better than this.

  

  This is a very common lazyman’s meal replacement I used. No blending, just gobble up the blueberries.

  Hell, you even get a SHOVEL to scoop your carbs into a shaker. There are so many applications for this:

  • People with busy jobs who don’t have time to sit and eat, but can drink (ie some construction jobs)
  • Mixing with protein powder, berries, and optional greens powder for a real meal replacement
  • Making into sweet potato protein pancakes
  • Better oatmeal raisin cookies
  • Making a weight gainer that actually doesn’t suck (add some healthy fat to the meal replacement above and you’re about done)

  I honestly believe every bulker should have this in his house. Sometimes we are our the door and at the last minute, realize we forgot to eat something. You can mix this in less than 30 seconds and take it with you.

• Value: 6.5/10

  

  Chugs away. Love this stuff.

  So I can get 60 servings for $34.95 using PricePlow – that’s 1200 carbohydrates, or 34 carbs per dollar.

  Right now, at the store (I buy my vegetables at Sprouts), I can get 1lb (or ~454g) of raw yams for $1/lb. This means I can get 127 carbs per dollar from the store.^[1] That of course comes with extra effort of bulk cooking them and removing the skin, and eating them before they spoil.

  So there’s definitely a premium here, and because of that, you probably won’t want to rely on the REAL CARBS supplement all the time unless you’re financially well off. And I honestly don’t think Rich is preaching that either.

  Meanwhile, REAL CARBS doesn’t seem to spoil, and I bet a tub like this can last quite a while.

• Overall: 9/10

  Value be damned. I know we’re PricePlow so saying that is sacrilege, but this is a convenience product – not an all day every day product. It should be used as such.

  I love Real Carbs and I love this idea. It makes me wonder why it took a smaller startup like Rich Piana’s 5% Nutrition to be the first to make this happen. Regardless, it’s finally here and that’s all that matters.

So if you’ve been wanting a real carbohydrate supplement, or just a sweet potato supplement in general, look no further than this bad boy.

Final Verdict? In case you couldn’t figure it out, REAL CARBS is…

PricePlow Approved!

For more info, see our Rich Piana’s REAL CARBS blog post.

Ran out of room. Here’s the final picture!