Can I Use Ensure As a Meal Replacement?

Ensure is a line of ready-to-drink shakes. According to its manufacturer, it has a range of options to support different nutritional goals.

While Ensure wasn’t designed for weight loss, many people drink it as part of a weight loss plan.

More often, however, Ensure is consumed to maintain adequate calorie and nutrient intake or gain weight when someone’s ability to eat or prepare regular meals is compromised, such as after surgery or during illness, according to Harvard Medical School.

Ensure products contain 150 to 350 calories per serving, so if you’re looking to maintain, gain, or even lose weight, you’ll almost certainly need to incorporate other foods into your diet or drink more than one Ensure shake per meal each day.

What to Look for in a Meal Replacement Shake

According to Nebraska Medicine, a good meal replacement shake should have 20 to 30 grams (g) of protein per serving, at least 5 g of fiber, and fewer than 5 g of sugar.

Ensure makes one shake that mostly fits this nutritional profile. Its Max Protein shake is 150 calories and contains 30 g protein, 4 g fiber, and 1 g sugar.

Nebraska Medicine also advises not to use meal replacement shakes as your sole source of nutrition, unless you’re following a medically supervised meal replacement program.

Ensure Can Be Helpful in Certain Situations

Kingwood ER in Kingwood, Texas, says most people don’t realize that meal replacement shakes tend to contain high amounts of sugar and inadequate amounts of protein.

Shakes like Ensure can give you easily digestible nutrition when you’re recovering from illness or surgery, however.

And when you’re juggling work responsibilities that make preparing a healthy meal impossible, a meal replacement like Ensure can be a good option versus grabbing something from a vending machine or a convenience store.

Can Ensure Help With Weight Loss?

In one small study, researchers had participants try a diet featuring two meal replacement shakes per day along with one whole food meal and three to five whole food snacks, totaling 1,200 to 1,600 calories daily.

Participants were overweight or had obesity. They lost an average of about 6.5 pounds during the 60-day study.

The meal replacement they drank had 240 calories, 9 g fat, 24 g carbohydrates, 8 g fiber, and 20 g protein per serving. It had no sugar, as it was sweetened with monk fruit.

Participants didn’t report a significant increase in hunger during the trial despite reducing the number of calories they consumed.

While Ensure Max Protein contains a somewhat similar macronutrient profile with 30 g protein, 1 g sugar, and 4 g fiber, it only has 150 calories. It also hasn’t been studied in a clinical trial to determine whether people would lose weight or feel satiated as the participants in the study did.

Talk to your doctor if you’re planning to replace meals with a shake like Ensure. Meal replacement can be helpful in moderation, but many Ensure products have high sugar content and low fiber, which could be problematic.