Ensure® vs. Nepro®, Phosphorus

Oops. We have the vanilla flavor Ensure High Protein at home, not the mile chocolate flavor. I like the taste of Ensure more than Nepro. There’s a weird aftertaste to Nepro and it lingers in your mouth for a long time. There’s also more of a milk taste to Ensure whereas Nepro just tastes artificial.

Ensure is also a lot cheaper. I buy Nepro directly from the Abbott store. If you get an order form from the dialysis nutritionist, the cost is $57 for a case of 24, or $2.38 each. Otherwise it’s $92 and prices are similar on Amazon. For Ensure, you can buy almost anywhere (Target, supermarkets) for $9/six-pack, or $1.50 each. On Amazon, it’s even cheaper.

Looking at the nutritional labels again, Ensure has 250 mg of phosphorus vs. 170 mg for Nepro. I take 800 mg of Renvela (Sevelamer Carbonate) each meal. This paper states that the phosphorus binding capacity for Renvela is only ~21 mg/g. That means it will take four of the huge tablets to absorb the excess phosphorus in Ensure. Another paper says dialysis only removes 800 mg of phosphorus per session so an extra 80 mg is not trivial. However, my phosphorus results from the last set of labs is in the middle of the normal range so maybe I have some room to indulge in Ensure instead of Nepro.