Protein Bars

What does that much protein look like? If you eat a hard-core steak and eggs diet, each egg is around 7 grams of protein. That is equivalent to 14 to 17 eggs a day. And steak is about ¼ protein, ¼ fat, and ½ water. That means you would need 400 to 480 grams of steak each day; 14 to 17 ounces of steak. In terms of hamburgers that would amount to 4 to 5 quarter pound burgers each day. As you can see, getting enough protein is a challenge. If you don’t get that daily protein, you are not able to replace damaged cells in your body effectively, so your body has to try and work with lots of broken cells. That means your organs and glands don’t work as well as they should. Your muscles are weaker than they should be. Your immune system is not as strong as it needs to be. You age faster.

I have many patients that are vegans. This issue is particularly important for them as plants don’t have a lot of protein in them compared to meat. Beans are about the best vegetable sources of protein and they average about as much protein per ½ cup as an egg. So that means you would have to eat 7 to 9 cups of beans each day. It is doable, but man that is a lot of beans. That is why I tell my vegan patients that they must find a good protein powder that they can use to supplement their diet. A delicious protein shake a couple of times per day can go a long way towards meeting their daily protein needs. But in reality, protein shakes are not all that convenient. For that reason, we usher in the protein bar.

Protein bars are super easy to eat and convenient to carry around. There are literally 50 to 60 different types of these bars in my local grocery store. The problem I personally have with most of them is that they are also full of sugar. Protein powder is not all that tasty, so making a product that the public will eat is challenging. The problem is not insurmountable, however, if you use a sugar substitute that is healthy for the body. My favorite substitute is allulose. I also like stevia, monk fruit, and erythritol. Any or all of these could be used to make healthy protein bars without the damaging impact of all that sugar. The manufacturing and marketing issue here is that the protein powder is already expensive as an ingredient so they offset the cost with cheap sugar as a filler. The sugar substitutes are also expensive compared to cheap sugar. As of yet, none of the brands I looked at in the store have started using these healthier alternatives. What really gets my goat is that even using cheap sugar as filler, they still charge outrageous amounts for their protein bars.

That is precisely the type of situation that gets my creative cooking side stimulated. Toward that end, I have been playing with ingredients to come up with a simple homemade protein bar recipe. Simple is a key metric for my stuff. I do not have the time or desire to make a seven-layer confection of ingredients to try to replicate the taste of my favorite candy bar. I am after something more like a stiff fudge bar with some crunch in it. The goal is a protein snack without all the sugar around it that still eats like a fudge bar. The other alternative for easy protein snacks is jerky. This works for me and I have written a newsletter or two on this subject many years ago. But for those who are not meat-inclined, jerky does not work. So today we tackle protein bars.

The first step is to find a good protein powder that fits your needs. Personally, I use egg white protein because I already have a lot of it around the house. Find a powder that you don’t mind the taste of. Look for ingredients like pea protein, soy protein, hemp protein, egg white, milk protein, the list goes on. I tried some chicken and turkey protein the other day. It was nasty. Find one that tastes okay and does not have any sugar in it. We will be adding our own sweetener to the bar.

Powders are powdery – not good to eat straight. So we need to add something with some fat and taste into the bar mix. I am using a couple of different kinds of nut butter with a low-carb level. Peanut butter and almond butter work just fine. For sweeteners, I like to use the rare sugar allulose. It not only has no calories, but it also triggers the gut hormone that shuts off hunger. I put a cup of the protein powder into my food processor along with half a cup of the nut butter and half a cup of the allulose. I let this mix for a minute to make a fine crumbly mixture. When making the first batch of this, I did not use a food processor. I just blended everything with a spoon. If you want to add any spices or flavors at this point, like cinnamon or vanilla or possibly even something spicy, go ahead.

The next step is to blend in the first of the binding agents. For this, I use vegetable glycerin (glycerol). Start with just a quarter of a cup and blend it in. Depending upon how dry your protein powder is and the nut butter you use, you may need to use up to another quarter cup of glycerin. The mixture should be a soft crumbly mix that will stick together when pressed. Now add in the crunchy bits. I used sugar-free trail mix, Catalina Crunch cereal broken down a bit with a rolling pin, and Magic Spoon chocolate cereal as my crunchy add-ins. Mix this all in well. Last of all, add ½ cup sugar-free chocolate chips and mix them in well. I am using Bake Believe no sugar dark chocolate chips. I found them at Sam’s Club in Folsom.

Okay, time for the magic. Put your mixture into a microwave-safe bowl and zap it for 1 minute in the microwave. This will melt the chocolate chips. Then beat the mixture well until all the chocolate is smoothly dispersed through the mixture. While the mixture is warm, spoon out cookie-sized lumps of dough onto a slick baking pan. Either leave them as lumps or squash them down to cookie shapes and let them cool. They will be soft while they are warm, but when the chocolate cools down completely, the bars will be firm and ready to eat. My batches generally run about 20 lumps. Each lump of mine has about 8 – 9 grams of protein.

good, don’t have any sugar or weird ingredients, and they cost a whole heck of a lot less to make and eat. No baking is needed and they don’t use water in the making of them, so they are fairly resistant to growing mold or other bugs. I keep mine in an airtight container on my kitchen counter. They don’t last all that long as they get eaten up.

each day, as keeping ourselves healthy begins with getting our most basic nutrition needs met. That means eating enough protein, drinking enough fluids, getting essential fats, and getting the minerals we need to build and repair our bodies. All the other things we do for our health are to be added to a solid nutritional foundation. Without that foundation, those other things can’t really do much for us.

David

Hey, that amazing C15 supplement that is for making your cell membranes stronger/less fragile is now available in the office! Pick yours up now! Learn more about it in this video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKt3S25Q-as

Ellen

Mystique in Folsom. We invited Amber Elliott from Elliott’s Health Foods to join us. We all had a great time and saw an excellent magic act.