By Brian Maslach
There are a lot of energy bars on the market and every time I go into a store it seems like there are at least one or two new ones. Some stores literally have a wall of bars to choose from.
Most bars seem to be mimicking whatever is popular at the moment. These “me too” products jump on the bandwagon for the latest trends and are often gone from the market as quickly as they appeared.
I developed Enduro Bites on 3 cornerstones at a time when at least 2 of them weren’t trendy.
Fresh Food Tastes Better
The first is what makes them unique. While most companies don’t even make their own products, we handcraft Enduro Bites ourselves in small batches daily to give you the freshest endurance food possible. The only way to get a bar fresher would be to make it yourself. Why does this matter? Because fresh food tastes better! Why don’t other brands do this? Because it’s a lot more work, not to mention not as cost effective (we don’t sacrifice quality for margin). It’s infinitely easier to send a purchase order to a big contract manufacturer and have them mass produce several months worth of product at once.
This isn’t to say there’s not a place for such products. Throw a few under the seat of your car to help get you through the impending zombie apocalypse. They’ll last longer than your car’s tires!
Simple, But Not too Simple
Ever look at the ingredient list on some products and wonder why they need what seems like 50 ingredients, some of which you have no idea what they are? I feel you, and often have to look up some of them myself to know what they are.
Simple means we use real-food ingredients and don’t unnecessarily overcomplicate our recipe to cut cost or artificially extend shelf life. Enduro Bites were created in a kitchen, not a lab.
However, it’s not a contest to see which product can have the fewest ingredients and there is no magic number to look for in a product. As with your overall diet, a variety of healthy, natural foods is best.
By simple, we don’t mean simply refined sugar, like so many sports-nutrition products that have some form of refined sugar as their first several ingredients. In most cases consuming all this refined sugar is counterproductive to why we’re being physically active in the first place. One of the main reasons for this is that it wrecks havoc on our insulin sensitivity. Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood sugar and having too much or too little leads to poor performance. Simply put, insulin sensitivity is how our bodies respond to the foods we eat. We want to have a high degree of insulin sensitivity since this means our bodies produce the ideal amount of insulin for a given feeding. Healthy individuals can improve insulin sensitivity through diet and exercise. Even though most of us have heard this many times, we fail to understand that what and how we eat trains our bodies, much like the physical activities we perform.
Finally, simple means leaving out potential allergens and everything else that might irritate your digestive system, because the last thing anyone wants when working out is an unhappy stomach.
Tastes so Good
The final foundation on which I created Enduro Bites is the most obvious -- taste. They had to be delicious. While we all want to eat great tasting food, taste becomes more critical during endurance events, when you need to maintain a consistent eating schedule, because you’ll be less likely to eat if you’re not looking forward to the taste of your food. Enduro Bites’ delicious taste also makes them a viable alternative when your sweet tooth wants to be satisfied.
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