The Great Energy Bar Deception: Ben Greenfield Gets Put In The Hotseat & Pulls Back The Curtains On The Packaged Foods Industry.

Hey, what's up, y'? All? That's actually not how we talk up here in Washington, but at some point in my life, probably because some of my family's from the southeast area of the U.S. i picked up the word y' all in my vernacular, and I just haven't dropped it. And I make no apologies, y'. All. So there. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Chocolate for me is a food of the gods. So I don't know if you feel similarly about chocolate, Angelo. You know, tribes like the Hasda tribe, when they're out on a hunt, they will stop, drop everything, drop their weapons, and turn to this as the primary fuel source because it is so tasty, so high in minerals, so high in antioxidants, so high in nutrients, and gives you this stable form of fuel that does not spike blood glucose. Cacao nibs, coconut flakes, almonds, grass fed gelatin, organic honey, white chia seeds, sesame seeds, organic pea protein, kanewa cocoa butter, sea salt. I mean, you put all this together and it tastes amazing. I could live on this mix for days at a time.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I admittedly used to be an energy bar and health bar addict, if you will. I would consume a good two to three energy bars an hour on a long bike ride. I always, always have some kind of, you know, super satiating healthy bar tucked away somewhere. During a run or in my bag or on a long road trip or an airplane ride, I would often be munching on some kind of a massive forearm sized protein bar while wandering out of the gym after weightlifting. I mean, I was a guy who ate a lot of these bars. You know, I would be sponsored by bar companies and use a lot of these bars and everything. From my early days nearly two decades ago as a bodybuilder, to, of course, my days as an ironman triathlete, to even, you know, up to a few years ago, simply my desire and days of traveling and wanting to carry healthy food along with me. And at the Same time, despite eating what many in our industry, and especially the lay public, would consider to be a healthy form of packaged fuel, I struggled a lot with constipation and with chronically elevated blood sugar and gut rot and some of the signs and symptoms of excess protein intake, energy level, roller coaster rides, toxins and metals, and all sorts of strange things showing up in my blood tests. I see the same thing happen in a lot of people who rely upon many of these packaged and processed foods that are advertised to us as healthy. I was just in a doctor's office. I won't name the doctor. I don't want to shove them under the bus. But I was at their clinic just a couple of days ago at the time that I'm recording this podcast, and they had this big wicker basket full of healthy granola and energy bars out for the clients in a medical clinic that, ironically enough, was there to manage chronic diseases and they were feeding their patients. When I look at the actual label of the energy bar, basically high fructose corn syrup or organic agave syrup, along with vegetable oils and soy proteins and whey proteins and isolated egg whites, a whole host of fillers and preservatives and flavorings that were not natural in the least. And it's ironic and, dare I say, disturbing how even the medical industry doesn't really understand this at all. This idea that just because something says healthy, just because it's in a package, just because it's high in protein, however you want to describe, any particular bar or package source of fuel, it's not necessarily healthy. And so what I decided I wanted to do was record kind of like the quintessential podcast, the last resource you would ever need to really wrap your head around how you should be choosing something like a packaged energy source, like a bar. Because don't get me wrong, even though I love me my kale and my lemons and my wild caught salmon and my grass fed beef and my seeds and my nuts and all that real food that is literally upstairs in my refrigerator and my pantry right now. I also recognize the convenience and even the better living through science that can be afforded through packaged foods. They just have to be done the right way, especially bars. And so I want to address that in today's podcast. And I also want to address the logistical component of bars as well. Because I've gotten seed stuck in my teeth during bike rides and I've had things freeze in my pockets while competing in Spartan races and nearly broken my teeth. I've had things melt into the bars on airplanes and just had a greasy, gooey mess when I open up any bar. And so there are logistical issues as well that I think a lot of people standing in lab coats in these whitewashed laboratories don't really understand when it comes to the bars that they're creating. So we're gonna cover all of that on today's show. And rather than me just talking at you, which would potentially be a very boring podcast, I decided to bring back onto the show someone who you don't get to hear from a lot, but who I frankly talk to every single day. This is not only one of my close friends, but one of my dear and trusted business partners, a guy who I've gotten to know in a really close way over the past couple years. We've spent a lot of time together in my sauna and my hot tub and my cold pool and at his house and at my house and on the phone and voxer and via email. Literally, the guy who I communicate with probably more than just about anyone else these days, even my wife possibly could be jealous, I'm not sure. But he is the COO and the co founder of my company, Keon, and his name is Angelo Keely. You may actually remember him for his incredibly superior beatboxing skills that he displayed on the last podcast that we did, in which he interviewed me about my life and the formation of Keon in general. He is down in Boulder, Colorado, right now. I am up in Spokane, Washington, right now. But via the wonders of technology, we are both here together for you to talk about bars, and he is going to serve as the interviewer of me. So, Angelo, welcome back to the show, man.

Man, thanks for the intro. I'm like, I got a little worried for our wives. It sounded so intimate there, but I.

Almost used the word intimate and then I stared, Claire.

But it's true, man. I mean, that's how close you have to get to build something like this. So it's an honor, man. I love being here with you, and I love having the opportunity to ask you these questions and, you know, just peel back some of this info and secrets behind energy bars and packaged food and what it's all about.

Now, before we do that, would it be possible at all to break the ice? Because I know people are going to demand this and possibly even be pissed if you don't do it. To have you give us the flavor of your. Your latest foray into beatboxing or whatever other strange musical mixes that you've been up to.

Yeah, man. You know, I actually thought you might ask that. And so I connected my looping pedal, which is like, my new favorite toy, so I can just like, add stuff like, here, check this out. You know, I'm off the Ben Greenfield show, and I am the coo, and we got the flow about to break it down. What do you think, Dude?

Holy cow. I was gonna go play a C chord on my ukulele, and you just made that sound incredibly boring. That's amazing. What's that called? A looping pedal?

Yeah, dude. Dude, you should get one for. Could you have a. You have, like, an output on your acoustic guitar?

Oh, yeah. I have a pickup. I have an amp. I have.

Dude, get one of these pedals, man. They're like. I'll send you the link. This one's like a boss RC30. We can put it in the. In the notes, too. But, man, you should seriously, like, you could just write your own little, like, bass lines, then play chords on top of it and sing. Dude, you would love it. It's so much fun.

Send it to me. Not only will I put it in the show notes, but I remember a concert, and I don't go to a lot of concerts, but I went to a concert by. I think it was Howie Day in Hawaii, the last time I was in Hawaii. And he loops a lot, but he's able, as a one man with a guitar to produce these incredible songs with this looping pedal. And I've always kind of wanted to learn how to use one, so maybe this is my impetus. After hearing you throw down that amazing little piece of. I don't know what you call it. Musical science?

Music. I think it's just called music.

Musical science. I like it. All right, so anyways, we digress. And, folks, don't worry. In the show notes, we'll put a link to pretty much everything that Angelo and I talk about today. But we digress from the topic at hand. Energy bars. So where do you want to start?

I think we should just start from the top. What is an energy bar? Where did it come from?

Okay, well, I happen to actually, in the past couple years after, of course, as I've already alluded to, researching and taking a much deeper dive into the energy bar industry and what exactly goes on behind the scenes when it comes to formulating and creating and stabilizing and packaging a lot of these bars. I have also looked into the. The history of these things and where they came from in the first place is actually very intriguing. They were originally made for, of all, folks, astronauts. And it was the Pillsbury Doughboy folks. And they created this thing called the space food stick. This was back in the 60s. So there was an astronaut named Scott Carpenter you may have heard of.

And he's actually from Boulder. We have like a, we have a big park there. It's like one of my kids favorite pools, the Scott Carpenter pool.

Oh, no kidding. Well, this dude also, he developed these things called space food cubes. Space food Cubes, which is a great name you should call your next album.

By the way, child. Space Food Cubes.

Yeah. So he and John Glenn were consuming a lot of these foods in space. Now John was consuming a lot of this fruit flavored drink, Tang, which I actually used to love. My grandma would come and visit me and she would always have bagels and she would have fish from Miami. And then she would bring us these canisters of Tang, which I love because my parents wouldn't buy us Tang, but grandma would bring us Tang. And it turns out that John Glenn would drink Tang while in space and Scott Carpenter would have these small space food cubes that eventually the Pillsbury company, the Pillsbury Food engineers decided to replicate. So Pillsbury, in 1970, they filed a trademark for what are called space food stuff sticks. And they completely repackaged them. So this was essentially something that could be preserved and eaten in space. And then they advertised them to consumers as a quote, nutritionally balanced between meal snack and they were also working on other things like a non crumbly cake and relish that could be served in slices, almost like Spam, which sounds incredibly disgusting, and meat that needed no refrigeration. I mean, they were kind of like at the forefront of, of this whole kind of nasty packaged and processed food industry movement. But it was Pillsbury who filed this trademark for space food sticks. And believe it or not, as the space program kind of faded from government focus for a short period of time, the space food stick also really didn't make it. It faded from the market. People did not want to eat astronaut food.

Who would have known that astronauts would have been such a small demographic, huh?

Hey, when I was a kid, I would have, I would have loved to have eaten what the astronauts ate. I feel like if Pillsbury would have advertised these or done the marketing in a slightly different manner that they, they probably could have crushed it with space food sticks. Who knows? Maybe that's. Yeah, that's, that's what Olympians around the world would be consuming. But it really was until the 80s, the, the late 80s, about 1986, when this guy Named Brian Maxwell. Brian Maxwell, who was a marathoner. He was a marathoner from Canada. He founded this company that a lot of folks who are listening in have probably heard of before and it was Power Bar. So he claimed to be creating this perfect energy bar to help athletes survive long distance events without running out of glycogen or storage carbohydrate. And they began by handing this out to marathoners after races. And eventually this was in 2000. So about 15 years later, after building Power Bar, they sold to nestle for 375 miles million. And that was the very first big energy company was Power Bar. And I actually used to, used to eat a lot of Power Bars. Peanut butter Power Bar, despite nearly breaking my teeth and probably causing extreme hypertrophy of my jaw muscles, was one of my go to sources of energy for a very long period of time. And after they sold to Nestle, a host of different energy bar and processed healthy food marketing companies popped up. Clif Bar and Muscle Mill. And today it's about a $9 to $10 billion industry, unfortunately, primarily comprised of a bunch of chemical cocktails neatly packaged in plastic that's shiny and they advertise to kids, but that are full of a host of nasty compounds that we'll kind of get into and take a deeper look at. But ultimately it moved From Space Food 6 to Power Bar and then like Clif Bar and Muscle Milk and all these other companies kind of popped up.

So you just mentioned this like full of like nasty stuff. And I mean there's, there's a reputation, right, for packaged foods having a whole list of ingredients that people don't understand. But specifically in the world of energy bars, what stands out?

Well, I don't, I don't want to be the Food Babe. Right. Like she, I mean, don't, don't get me wrong, she's been on my podcast. I forget. Do you remember the Food Babe's name?

I don't.

It's unfortunate when you, when you have a moniker like the Food Babe, everyone forgets your actual real name name because the Food Babe is such a sexy title. But anyways, the Food Babe was on my show and I've talked to her before at conferences and she has this rule that if a third grader can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it. And I think that's a silly rule. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in that camp. I think that methylcobalamin and hydroxy vitamin D and a lot of these components that we find added to foods as actual beneficial vitamins and nutrients and ingredients are not necessarily bad for it. I don't think that just because you can't put pronounce it that it's bad for you. But at the same time, we do see a host of chemical cocktails even in these bars that are marketed as healthy or as gluten free, or as low sugar, or as anything else that we've come to know as the marketing spiel that people toss onto the packages of their energy bars. So what I did was over the past couple of years, as I kind of began down the path of wanting to create and also look into this whole idea of whether or not you could make a healthy packaged product, I turned to my friends in the natural products and the nutrition industry. I talked to bar and natural product formulators and food scientists and nutrition researchers and found some pretty shocking issues even with a lot of these leading paleo energy bars and health bars that you're going to find lining the shelves of supplement stores and ad expos and sitting in the warehouses of Internet supplement companies. And one of the things I found was a complete review. It was a review of all the leading paleo bars. And even that review found that many of them were quite similar to the non paleo to the non natural health bar. So we're talking about something, the bar that you'd pay four or five dollars for and find in the grocery store aisle of like an Erewhon or a whole Foods or something like that. And then, you know, these ones that are, you know, that we know, might be a little less healthy already just based on the ingredient label, like a power bar or a clif bar, you know, with the soy and the wheat and everything else that those have in them. So it turns out that the paleo bars, you know, a lot of these healthy bars, they have a sugar content that nearly matches the sugar content of a Snickers or a three Musketeer. So we're talking about sugar content that can be as high as 28 grams in a single bar, matched with a total calorie profile and an overall protein profile, because excess protein can also spike blood glucose. That made them really almost like a nutritional firestorm, just a crap bomb, if I can make up that term to drop into the body. And I know a lot of people are familiar. I don't want to insult people's intelligence and talk necessarily about how you shouldn't eat a brick of non GMO wheat or you shouldn't eat a bar that's just basically One giant cube of, of soy protein. But then there are other things that we think are healthy that we see on a bar that are not. And one that really shocked me was this one called isomaltooligosaccharide. Isomaltooligosaccharide. It's also abbreviated imo. And in an era of ketogenic infatuation and a lot of low carb products, this is an ingredient that you see quite a bit. It's promoted as a prebiotic dietary fiber. You may also know it more popularly by the name inulin. Not insulin, but inulin. And many of these bars include over 15 grams of this IMO or this inulin. And because that is considered to be a dietary fiber, it allows the bar manufacturer to make claims that that bar has a high amount of dietary fiber but a low amount of actual carbohydrate. Now, there are a host of problems with this claim, and I wouldn't be bringing this up unless this were an ingredient in probably, I would estimate about 70 to 80% of especially the healthier brands that I see out there. So, first of all, IMO syrup, which is what it is, it's not natural, as the bar label claims. Commercially available IMO syrup is enzymatically synthesized from starch. So basically, you begin with starch and you break it into these smaller glucose units that are linked together with chemical bonds, and they actually have to use chemicals for this entire extraction and enzymatic process. And again, I don't necessarily think that chemicals in and of themselves by being a chemical, are bad. A lot of multivitamins will use chemical processes to generate some of the ingredients in a multivitamin. But to say that it's 100% natural, in my opinion, opinion is false advertising. In addition to that, it's advertised. And this is probably even an even bigger issue. Let's say all those chemicals are healthy and your body's just going to be just fine with them. But IMO syrup is advertised as a completely undigestible dietary fiber, meaning, like kale, for example, the actual net amount of carbohydrate that enters into your body that would wind up spiking your blood sugar, you know, in the case of a bunch of vegetables, is pretty nil. And the same is claimed of IMO syrup. But there have been studies, and we can link to them in the show notes that use a digestive modeling system. And what they do is they look at how much of this IMO actually gets hydrolyzed as it goes through your gut, how much goes through the small intestine, how much reaches the colon intact. And it turns out that a huge amount of it is in fact digested and is in fact absorbed and is in fact metabolized, resulting in a spike of blood glucose levels from something like an IMO up to about 136. And to put that in perspective, healthy blood glucose levels generally you're going to look at like 80 to 90. And a spike that high is similar to something you get from a fricking candy bar. But manufacturers are allowed to say that IMO is calorie free and that IMO is a low sugar non concerning dietary fiber that you can simply add and don't even need to list the carbohydrate content for, but it does in fact result in about 3 calories per gram of IMO that they add to these bars. And it does indeed allow for a big significant spike in blood glucose and insulin upon consumption of one of these high fiber, quote, low carb, unquote energy bars. That was one shocking issue. I mean, have you seen inulin as an ingredient on bars before, Angelo?

Yeah, I mean I've seen it on tons of bars and I just wondered like, what is it? Why is it there? And I guess it's a syrup. It helps it stick together, right?

Right. Well, it's there as a syrup to help it stick together. But even more importantly, inulin allows you to get that mouthfee and even allows you to get that syrupy sweet flavor. But then you can mislead the customer by telling them that it's a low carb product or that's a non blood glucose spiking product, when in fact it is not. And especially when you combine that with the very high amounts of protein that you often also find in these bars. And protein is not bad, but excess protein, and especially excess protein from soy protein isolate, for example, that's basically processed soy leftover. You know, the process of isolating soy protein leaves behind hexane, it leaves behind aluminum, it leaves behind high concentration of what are called trypsin inhibitors, which block the digestion of the actual plant protein. You know, we see Soy, you know, 90% of it's genetically modified anyways, which, you know, there's, you know, the research goes back and forth about whether that's an issue, but I personally just try to steer clear of this stuff. But you look at the, the ingredient label of a lot of energy energy bars, that's either soy protein isolate or whey protein isolate and very similar to soy protein isolate. A lot of people will look at whey protein isolate and think that it's healthy. But there are a great number of people who have an immune response or an allergenic response to whey. They get brain fog, or they get digestive issues, or they get gas, or they get bloating. After eating one of these energy bars that's primarily proteinated with soy protein or whey protein, their blood sugar spikes from the inulin that they're getting along with that. And it just creates this chemical cocktail in the body that people don't realize they're getting because all they're looking for is to ensure that the bar does not have, you know, back to the food, babe, you know, a whole bunch of ingredients you can't pronounce. But in fact, there's a lot of stuff that can fly under the radar that you can be consuming or that you can be feeding to your kids at their soccer game or their. Or their tennis match or wherever that you're not aware of.

Yikes, man. So what are the options then? Basically?

So my question that I asked to a lot of these energy bar industry experts when I found out a lot of this stuff was, first of all, how could we formulate a clean burning bar that would hold up under rigorous conditions? Meaning how could you create a bar that didn't have a lot of these issues, but that one could still use, let's say, during a very hot Ironman triathlon, you know, without getting seeds stuck in your teeth and stuff sticking to the bar and all palatability just going out the window. How could you use something like this while snowboarding or skiing without creating, you know, anybody who's consumed a power bar on the slopes knows, you know it's going to break your teeth if you try and chomp into that thing? And the same can be said of a lot of other bars on the market. How can we create that but have it not be like a high fat, greasy, low energy ketogenic bar that frankly, that's a gut bomb for a lot of people as well, still doesn't really result in a huge spike in carbohydrates. So we're talking about something that would be like a lowish carb, relatively high fat in terms of good fats, especially Mediterranean style fats that a lot of people can process much better than high amounts of saturated fats, enough protein to support amino acids and neurotransmitters and repair and recovery, but no dairy, no soy, no whey protein isolate, no soy protein isolate, especially none of this IMO or This insulin, but a very clean and hypoallergenic profile. I did not want gut assailants, right? Lectins are one big issue. Gluten, saponins, a lot of these plant defense mechanisms that you get from bars that have plant proteins at the them. That's another thing that I did not want in an energy bar. Yes on minerals, yes on electrolytes. In my opinion, especially if you are an athlete or an exercise enthusiast wanting to use an energy bar, must have those in the bar. You don't want to buy a bar and have to like sprinkle sea salt on it to get it to the profile that you actually desire. Bar that's not going to cause energy bar constipation. I mean, I have, pardon the expression, shat out of a straw during many periods of my life when I've relied upon a lot of these packaged foods just because they don't have adequate fiber in them. But at the same time, I don't want a bunch of IMO, blood spiking carbs in there as well. So, you know, that's another difficult barrier to overcome from a formulatory standpoint. Enough carbohydrate, right, to allow for liver glycogen restoration and muscle glycogen restoration, appetite satiety without an actual blood sugar spiking effect. In my opinion, that's another thing that one should be looking for in an energy bar, especially if you are an active person. I'm not talking about a complete carbohydrate bomb, but I'm talking about, you know, very similar to my own diet, right? Like I, I don't not eat carbohydrates. I eat what is called a cyclic ketogenic diet. I maintain a very high level of fat burning, a very high level of ketone, throughput it during the entire day and towards the end of the day will eat carbs generally ad libitum. And I get much better hormone stabilization, much better joint health, far better workouts the next day, especially for glycolytically demanding workouts. But I don't get that same carbohydrate spike as I'd get if I were eating carbs the entire day, eating sugar and starches the entire day. I want an energy bar that can give me that same type of ability, be able to almost, almost have my cake and eat it too, from a carbohydrate standpoint. And then finally freaking. I mean, in my opinion, taste is huge, right? I would rather, and I realize some people don't care about this because they Consider their packaged food to simply be functional science to achieve a physiological end. I personally, I'm a foodie. Like, I want stuff to taste good. I like peanut butter and chocolate gelato, and I like ribeye steaks, and I like sweet potatoes fries with a wonderful ketchup and maybe a stone mustard. And, you know, I like things that have good mouth fill, that have a good crunch, that have a good kind of. Kind of gooey chewiness that don't, you know, don't just dissolve in your mouth and disappear, but something that actually tastes good because that's an important part of satiety as well. I don't want to eat an energy bar and feel like I need to eat two more because either it didn't fill me up or my neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, we're not satisfied by it or just tasted so freaking crappy. I gotta go find something else to eat to wash it down with, which I've, you know, I've done that before in airports. For example, I've bought an energy bar that I know doesn't taste all that good. And then I've bought a chocolate bar to sandwich the energy bar in. Right? So. So you almost like make a chocolate bar energy bar sandwich so that the energy bar actually tastes good. So, I mean, there. There's all these things that I want in an energy bar. So that's. That's what I brought to formulators to actually ask them and to see if something like this would even be possible.

To create, to make the perfect energy bar, basically. So walk us through the steps then. Like, where did you go with this request? And then really trying to break it down. Like, what was the first thing you looked at?

First thing is the elephant in the room, in my opinion. That's preservatives, right? How do you create an energy. Energy bar that's actually going to be shelf stable? Because, I mean, you can go. And you've probably seen these before at grocery stores, right? There's certain energy bars that will be in the refrigerator. Kind of like Ezekiel Sprouted bread is in the refrigerator because it's minimal in preservatives, but you got to keep it in the refrigerator or the freezer because it'll go bad otherwise. That doesn't work for me when I'm traveling, when I'm on airplanes, when I want to purchase bars and have them in my pantry, and if I forget they're there and four, five, six months later I want to have some, I can still have that bar. And not have it go bad. So how do you minimize chemical preservatives without requiring for a bar to be refrigerated or frozen, which is inconvenient in my opinion, but still allow it to be shelf stable and what it turns out to be. And I think this is probably an expense issue that this isn't a better known in the. In the bar industry or in the nutritional formulation industry, you really don't need preservatives if you use a few simple ingredients to keep a bar stable, minimal preservatives. So things that would keep a bar shelf stable would be sea salt, that's one example, Chia seeds and other vitamin E or what would be considered antioxidant contributors like almond. Almonds, Tocopherols, which is a family of natural vitamin E compounds that you can find in foods like nuts or fish or leafy green vegetables. Sea salt, I mentioned that it's a classic preservative. Humans have used it for thousands of years to preserve food. Almonds are very dense in terms of their tocopherol content, their vitamin E content. Both of those are natural preservatives due to their antioxidant effects. Chia seeds, same thing. Overwhelming antioxidants, stores and some other nutritional benefits I can get into later that allow them to hold up extremely well. I mean, you can have a jar of natural chia seeds in your pantry for two to three years and it doesn't go bad because of the endogenous antioxidants. Even when you look at gelatin, you know, which is incredibly nourishing for the skin and the joint and the gut, that's also very stable over years. And it's something that you can add as a source to an energy bar without necessarily needing a whole bunch of preservatives. So, so to keep a bar healthy and shelf stable with minimal preservatives, it simply comes down to adding a lot of these natural antioxidants as well as protein contributors and natural fat contributors and electrolyte contributors that allow you to achieve multiple effects. I can get into some of the benefits of some of these compounds in a little bit. But ultimately the cool thing is that if you use real, clean food in a bar and you select the kind of real, clean, clean food that is also shelf stable due to its high antioxidant content, you can have a healthy bar with very minimal amount of preservatives.

What seems most bizarre and surprising to me is that all these things taste good too. Like they would go well together. So it's like the industry goes to all these extents to create these kind of weird, like super concocted flavors when you could just use real foods. And they themselves are, are both taste good and they serve as preservatives.

Yeah, I mean, admittedly it's slightly more expensive to do anytime you use real food. You know, anytime that I decide I'm going to get a grass fed sausage from elk and make that with one of my wife's homemade sourdough loaves and use an organic ketchup and some heirloom tomatoes. It's gonna be more expensive than a corn dog. It just is. But at the same time, real food has a host of benefits that I think far outweigh any savings that you're going to get by cutting costs and adding chemical preservatives. So that was really the first thing that I wanted to do was use natural preservatives. And along the same lines I wanted natural protein. Protein that was not going to be hyperallergenic protein that was not going to create excess spikes in insulin, protein that wasn't going to introduce GMO ingredients like a soy protein or a wheat based protein. So the next thing that I turned to was the actual protein issue. My goal when I have an energy bar is not necessarily for it to be a high protein bar. I mean, there's a lot of people now who are aware that excess protein can produce excess insulin and potentially induce accelerated aging due to the spike in MTOR and the longevity issues you can get from excess protein intake. It's why I personally only eat meat a few times a week. And I eat a lot of vegetables and a lot of fats in between. But I'm careful with protein. More protein is not better, basically. But it turns out that you can get a lot of good amino acid precursors, neurotransmitter precursors, the type of satiety that you would want from a bar without necessarily adding some of these protein culprits, such as the popular whey protein isolate or soy protein isolate. One example would be gelatin. You know, gelatin, it's incredibly gut nourishing. You get it from bone broth, for example, and it turns out that you can get ample amounts of gelatin into a bar, the equivalent of about a half cup of bone broth into a bar, which is great for the gut, great for the joints, great for the muscles. And so I found gelatin from grass fed cows that could be added to a bar. It's highly bioavailable. You get a full spectrum of what are called long chain amino acids, which serve as the building block for connective tissues like bones and cartilage and skin and tendons. And that's one thing very simple protein that can be added to energy bars that you find very few and far between when it comes to. To gelatin being an actual component in a bar. Another one is a fantastic hypoallergenic, what I would say is almost like an ancestral protein source, especially when you rinse it and you soak it to remove a lot of the soap, like irritants called saponins that are on it. And that would be quinoa. And you've no doubt heard of quinoa before, which I used to pronounce quinoa before I realized that, that there actually is a more traditional way to pronounce quinoa. But ultimately it's quinoa. When you buy a big. Have you ever bought the quinoa from like, let's say like Costco, for example? Angelo?

I haven't done it from Costco. We've gotten big bags before, big bags of quinoa.

So you buy those, a lot of people will make them and they'll be like, oh, quinoa, you know, gives me horrible craps and gas and bloating. Well, it's because even when you buy the bags of it from the grocery store, it's not, not rinsed to remove the saponins. It's not actually treated properly. But quinoa, when it's actually rinsed and soaked and it's treated the way that it's supposed to be treated to reduce the natural plant defense mechanisms. It's incredibly high in amino acids. It has all nine essential amino acids that your body can't produce on its own. It's extremely high in flavonoids, which makes it, as I alluded to earlier, high in shelf stable antioxidants. And it's got a host of vitamins and minerals in it. I mean, iron and B vitamins and vitamin E, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, manganese. I mean, it is an incredible. A lot of people think it's a grain, it's technically a grass. But the cool thing is that there is actually a close cousin of quinoa. A lot of times it's called baby quinoa and it's called kaniwa, kanewa and kanewa. Just like quinoa is a perfect plant based protein source. But whereas quinoa has these small seed grains that are usually red or dark brown or white, the kaniwa, because it has slightly Higher antioxidants in it. It's usually dark red or it's brown, but it has this delicious, crunchy, nutty flavor with this slight amount of natural sweetness. So quinoa, it's kind of fluffy and it's soft. Kanewa is different. It's more like crunchy, kind of pops in your mouth. So it gives you this amazing mouthfeel along with all of the amino acid benefits that you get from a quinoa. So those were two really compelling protein sources that I found was grass fed gelatin and organic kaniwa. Now, in terms of getting a really good full spectrum of proteins, because as many vegans or vegetarians well know, it can be difficult to get all the amino acids that you need when you're not eating meat. Like having a rib eye steak is pretty convenient when it comes to getting all the protein that you need. But if you're not going to do that, you need to combine grains and seeds and nuts and different forms of vegetables to be able to, by the end of the day, get all the different amino acids that your body needs. So to round out the profile, protein profile. To perfect the protein profile on a bar, what I wanted to add was a touch of pea protein. Now, a lot of people look at peas as a legume, especially, you know, paleo enthusiasts, because legumes are considered to be high in that natural plant defense molecule, lectins and also phytic acid. And that can be irritating to the gut. Indeed. But it turns out that using a hydrolysis process, you can extract the actual protein from the peas, get none of the gut irritating compounds that come along with them, and make what I would consider to be like a paleo plant based protein, meaning allergen free, unlike whey or soy, still high in a very unique array of amino acids. The amino acid profile of pea protein is incredible. It's got huge amounts of lysine and arginine and branched chain amino acids and natural enzymes that help your body to actually digest those, a host of vitamins and minerals and nutrients. You put those three together, gelatin and kanewa and also the pea protein, specifically a hydrolyzed pea protein isolate, and you have the perfect amount of bioavailable protein in an energy bar with none of the allergens and minimal preservatives in this amazing mouth feast and crunchy, nutty flavor. So that essentially is how you create the perfect protein. And I've never seen those three combined together, but it is an amazing amino acid profile when you get all three of those in the Same room, so to speak.

Yeah, and it sounds too like, I mean, the way that they. The actual texture of them and the way that they come together as well. It not only again, serves just the protein function, but has the potential to create the flavor profile and the mouthfeel. That's a lot better than a block of soy.

Yeah, you're still missing out on the chocolate. You would still have to, if you were to have all of those, sandwich them into a chocolate bar to get the ultimate flavor, in my opinion.

But so what about chocolate?

Yeah, that's what I serve. Anything you gotta have fat. And again, I don't like to the greasy ketogenic gut bombs, but I do like me a little bit of fat not only for that chocolatey flavor, but of course, so that you get a more stable glycemic response. You get that mouth feel, you get the satiety, and you get that. I want to sandwich my energy bar into dark chocolate bar type of flavor. So when it comes to fat, again, I want stuff that can be super duper, easily digested, but taste amazing. And so the first fat source that I looked into was something called a white chia seed. A white chia seed. A lot of people see the black or the dark gray chia seeds. Now the white chia seeds come from a plant called the salvia hispanica plant. Now chia seeds in general, a lot of people are familiar with these as, you know, term that's, that's overused, but that is still appropriate in this sense. A superfood. Right. So chia seed has a protein content of about 25% dietary fiber. That's not like the IMO syrup dietary fiber because it doesn't spike the blood sugar in the same way. That's about 30%. And it also contains a ton of omega 3 fatty acids, similar to what you get from like a fish oil, vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. Very nutrient dense. I mean, the Aztec warriors would munch on chia seeds to give them energy and endorse and, you know, they would claim that a single spoonful of chia could sustain them for 24 hours. It's actually what chia means in the Mayan language. That's what it comes from. It means strength. So it was also known as the runner's food because they would give them to runners and to warriors who were fighting a long battle or who were running long distances. And chia seeds have an incredible amount of research behind them for promoting healthy skin and reducing signs of aging and supporting the heart and the digestive system system and building stronger bones and muscles. I mean, recently they've been linked to the management of diabetic symptoms when they soak in the juices of your digestive system. And this is kind of a 1, 2 combo. With this, along with the half bone broth cup full of gelatin, they coat the lining of the stomach. They serve as a gut nourishing compound, which is incredible for anybody who has gut issues, but especially during physical activity. If you can eat a bar that kind of settles to down the gut because this white chia seed content, then it's kind of a bonus to the bar. So white chia seeds were the first fat source that I looked into.

That's actually like kind of one of my biggest concerns too is like indigestion sometimes from eating bars. And so this idea of like it coating my stomach is awesome.

Yeah. And that combined with some of the natural enzymes that you get from the pea protein isolation late. And so you actually do not need to consume something like a digestive enzyme supplement along with your bar or even say, like, eat the bar in very small chunks. I used to do this during my triathlons or marathons. You could only eat like, you know, a sixth of the bar at a time because otherwise your gut would just flip. You know, I want to be able to just like, if I need to open a bar, slam the whole thing and just keep going. And so the chia seeds and the gelatin along with the pea protein isolate, afford you the ability to be able to do that. Now, I mentioned how a source of tocopherols and vitamin E so that you can make a bar shelf stable are almonds. And almonds, of course, a lot of people are familiar with as being very high in monosaturated or monounsaturated Mediterranean fats, high in antioxidants. And of course, they're just tasty. They have this nice crunchy texture. They're very high in oleic acid. Acid, your cell membranes, specifically your nerve cheese, the myelin cheese. They're composed primarily of oleic acid and DHA. About 30% of the myelin cheese are oleic acid. That's why I recommend people who want to optimize their nerves consume a lot of Mediterranean fats such as almonds or almond oil, along with extra virgin olive oil. So you get really good healthy nervous system support from almonds. But then of course, everything else, from the antioxidants to the cognitive performance benefits, to the blood flow to the flavor. So white chia seeds Combined with almonds from a nut standpoint is what I went with. But we still didn't address the elephant in the room. And that would be how much chocolatey goodness can you squeeze into one single energy bar? I'm personally a fiend for chocolate. We go to ice cream and my kids will get strawberry sorbet or lemon sorbet or, or whatever, bubblegum flavored gelato. And to me that's just a bastardization of the ice cream shop because if the ice cream does not have chocolate in it, in my opinion, it's just a waste of time. It's a waste of time. It's gotta be chocolate, peanut butter or. I had. When I was in. Where was I? I was in Venice Beach a few days ago and I had cherry chocolate bacon ice cream, which was just mind blowing. And the chocolate for me is a food of the gods. It's a food of the gods. So I don't know if you feel similarly about chocolate, Angela.

Oh man, I could not feel more similarly. I was going to ask you, how was the gelato in Sardinia?

It was okay. I don't think that one of the things that confer longevity to the Sardinians is their gelato. Because I've had amazing gelato in Rome. Some of the best gelato in the world is actually just outside Vatican City in Rome. And even when I was in Estonia a few weeks ago, had wonderful, wonderful gelato. Europe has fantastic gelato. But Sardinia in general did not seem to. To have the gelato thing down quite like the rest of Italy. Unfortunately, there are other good things. Oh well, great wine. Great wine and good rosemary anyways though. So with chocolate, what I began with looking into for an energy bar was what is called chocolate liqueur. Chocolate liqueur. You may have, if you've ever had a chocolate martini at a fancy cocktail bar, had the opportunity and the pleasure to experience a chocolate liqueur. It's a low processed chocolate. It's about half part cocoa butter and half part cocoa solids. And it's far lower in sugar. Despite the the moniker liquor, it's far lower in sugar than other commercial forms of chocolate. So it's a way to get chocolate into a bar without spiking the, the sugar content of the bar. And then the next thing I wanted was a little bit of stuff, saturated fat or like my own diet is about. It's about 10 to 15% saturated fat and the rest is monounsaturated fats, more Mediterranean fats. So I added a touch of cocoa butter, which gives you like this healthy energy, stabilizing saturated fats, and then a little bit of extra antioxidants for the natural preservative effect. And for even more chocolate with a cocoa powder. Cocoa powder. So I've got chocolate liqueur, cocoa butter and cocoa solids. Cocoa powder. And then I moved on to one of my favorite superfoods of all time. This is kind of a second superfood in addition to the white chia seeds, and that is cocoa nibs. I actually just had a. I keep a big bag in the freezer and I sprinkle them on my smoothie every morning. Cocoa nibs are. I mean, in my opinion, they're. They're one of the lesser implemented superfoods. A lot of people are really missing out on. On when it comes to enjoying an incredibly important part of dopamine and chocolate, and that's the cocoa nibs. They're enormously high in fiber. So a single ounce of them have a whopping nine grams of fiber. They have tons of antioxidants. They have boatloads of magnesium, 64 milligrams of magnesium in one ounce of cocoa nibs. Considering that most of the world's population is deficient in magnesium, athletes. Athletes are notoriously low in magnesium. This is very good news. More potassium per ounce cacao nibs have than a freaking banana. They're chock full of iron. Another wonderful, wonderful food, especially for active individuals and exercise enthusiasts. And of course, cocoa works on your neurotransmitters. Like I mentioned a little bit earlier, you know, you get a big boost of dopamine, so the bar itself, when it has chocolate in it, is more satiated. It's. You just get a better overall feel in terms of your mood when you consume it. I mean, there's an article I was reading recently called the magical thing eating chocolate does to your brain. You get this big blood flow to your brain not only from all the antioxidants and the nitric oxide precursors in chocolate, but also the dopamine release that you get from it. So when you combine chia and almond flavor flavor with chocolate liqueur and cocoa butter and cocoa powder and cocoa nibs in a bar, you get gobs of wonderful chocolate without spiking the blood sugar, with none of the additives or the chemicals that you'd find in a Hershey's bar or a Snickers bar. And it is just. It's this profile that's mind blowing when it comes to mixing these different types of chocolate together. And I would Be remiss not to talk about chocolate without mentioning what I feel is very similar to like turkey and cranberry or mint and lamb or peanut butter and jelly. And that would be the combination of chocolate And Angelo, I'll let you hazard a guess as to the food that I think pairs perfectly with chocolate.

Coconut. That's what it is for me.

It's coconut. It's coconut. So coconut flakes, very nutritious, very rich in fiber, high in vitamins, high in minerals. You know, once thought of as being, you know, high in saturated fats, but we all know it's, it's different than fats, it's different than saturated fats. Coconut, particularly like a coconut meat or coconut flake or coconut oil, very rich source of medium chain triglycerides. So medium chain triglycerides, those don't circulate in your bloodstream or need to pass through the normal digestive process to be converted into energy. Instead they're sent straight to the liver where they are converted into energy and also result in the throughput of ketone bodies. So this is a way, coconuts, especially in a bar, are a way to enhance the ketogenic effect of a bar and give you a really slow release, stable form of fuel that doesn't require the same amount of digestion as say like a nice marbly cut of meat or you know, like wild caught fish with the skin on it. All of that is great. But when you're on the go, especially if you're exercising, you want something that's going to be burnt right away and wind up in your body as ketones and fat based energy without needing to pass through the normal digestive process. So it was, it was very difficult for me to find a pure and clean source of coconut flakes, but I was able to, to figure out that piece as well. And so that is essentially from a fat standpoint how you make a healthy high fat, low carbohydrate bar with no greasiness. No need to add a gooey chocolate coating on the outside, which a lot of these bars do. That kind of flabbergasts me. Folks will make like a healthy energy bar and then just coat it in sugar based chocolate to make it taste good. You don't need to do that. If you use these ingredients and frankly the combination of white chia seeds, almonds, chocolate liqueur, a good cocoa butter, cocoa powder, cocoa nibs, and then finally a clean source of coconut flakes. I mean the, the mouthfeel and the flavor from this is Just absolutely amazing. So. So that is how I. How I created almost like a hedonistic flavor.

Amazing. You said the elephant in the room was preservatives, though. But when you start building up, like, all this flavor, I'm still wondering, like, but it's got to be sweet somehow. And I read the back of labels and it's. You know, there's. There's obviously all of the artificial sweeteners, which I want to stay away from, but there's, you know, there's cane sugar.

And there's corn syrup, organic agave syrup, which is essentially completed purely through a chemical process and results in this unnatural fructose glucose profile. That's just horrible for you. And it shocks me that that still flies under the radar as far as common knowledge when it comes to agave. But, yeah, I mean, you.

I don't eat just like, raw. I mean, I do. I do eat cocoa nibs, but other than that, I mean, they have to be a little sweet, right? So, like, how do you get it sweet?

Well, there's one energy source that my children grab when they come in the door from school just about every day, and I watch them eat gobs of this stuff. And I really don't care. A, because they're kids and their metabolism is high anyways, and B, because the nutrient profile, along with the flavor profile and the effect on the immune system, in terms of a positive modulatory effect on the immune system of this particular sweetener is something that I think makes it again, again, almost like a superfood. As a matter of fact, you look at these persistence hunters or, you know, tribes like the Hasda tribe, when they're out on a hunt, they will stop, drop everything, drop their weapons, and turn to this as the primary fuel source because it is so tasty, so high in minerals, so high in antioxidants, so high in nutrients, and gives you this stable form of fuel that does not spike blood glucose. So that fuel is. Drumroll, please. Organic honey. And I can sense the global sharp drawing in of breath at the mention of honey because of the amount to which fructose has been vilified as evil. And I am very well aware of that. There are multiple animal studies that suggest that high amounts of fructose will make you fat or give you fatty liver or result in, you know, some type of horrible, chronic, worldwide disease like diabetes. But the fact is that in these studies, not only are they feeding rodents pure, unnatural, isolated fructose, not the natural, natural fructose glucose mix you find in a good Organic honey. But they were mainlining it into the bloodstream of these rodents in extremely high amounts, like the equivalent of Uri Angelo sucking down oodles of coke. Like, you know, stopping in a McDonald's, rolling around through the drive through, grabbing another cup, grabbing another cup, and just like doing multiple 32 ounces of Coke and essentially spinning cookies around the McDonald's parking lot during the entire day to get another bottle or cup of Coke. So ultimately we cannot take those studies and as, as you would imagine, turn around and say honey is evil. I mean, honey is not only is it an ancestral food, like I mentioned earlier, it's all over the freaking Bible, right? Like, as, as one of these ambrosia like superfoods. And not to say that just because it's in the Bible means it's, it's the perfect, perfect food for man. But ultimately it's one of those things that I respect as a natural ancestral food, assuming it is consumed with moderation and with control. It turns out that fructose, the fructose from honey specifically, it's metabolized almost completely in the liver, where it replenishes your liver's glycogen levels and results in a small synthesis of triglyceride. As a matter of fact, under 1% of ingested fructose is actually converted to triglyceride in the bloodstream. So it's not going to spike triglyceride levels, but allow for a slight slow bleed in energy levels. Much of it is converted into lactate and then into glucose for energy. About 15% of it is converted to storage glycogen. And the glucose and the lactate you derive from the fructose in honey gets released as this slow energy to cells all over the body. And better yet, because fructose is not what's called an insulin secretagogue, meaning that it doesn't result in the release of insulin far friendlier to the pancreas, can in fact lower circulating insulin. And in addition to that, it's an incredible nutrient dense sweetener. I mean, you go into my pantry and you're gonna, yeah, you're gonna find organic stevia, which would be really the only, you know, non calorie based sweetener that I would use, other than monk fruit. Monk fruit would be another that you'll find in my pantry. But blackstrap molasses, a good organic local maple syrup, a good organic honey, you're gonna find those as the type of things that my kids, when they walk in the door, are smearing on a Big loaf of mom's sourdough bread with a little bit of almond butter or cashew butter or walnut butter or something else that makes it the equivalent of like a super duper healthy peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The glycemic index of honey is relatively low. It's about 32 to 85 depending on the botanical source. And this means that the glycemic load, how much a food will raise a person's blood glucose after consuming it, is not an issue at all when it comes to honey, especially moderated amounts of honey. I mean, the list of benefits of honey, especially when compared to other sources of sugar, is absolutely mind blowing. I'll put a link to an article in the show notes for this podcast@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bar. That's where I'm going to put all the shownotes for this episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bar and it's not just the fact that honey is a glycemic friendly sweetener. The organic honey, it's incredibly nutrient dense. It has, for example, the starch digesting enzyme amylase in it, which clears the antibodies that are associated with the allergies to pollens when you consume honey. Meaning, like if you have an allergy, a lot of times one of the best things that you can do is for a pollen allergy or hay fever or something like that, you hunt down a good local raw honey because it has this immune modulatory effect. But it's also very rich in prebiotics, it's rich in probiotics. Honey has this diverse and ancient set of beneficial lactic acid bacteria that they first discovered within the gut of honeybees. And there were over 50 different species of beneficial bacteria that you get from one single single honeybee. And a lot of this actually winds up in the honey itself. And I know the first thing people worry about as well, you say honey is high in probiotics, for example. But what happens once you heat it? What's the effects of heating on the nutrients like the enzymes in a good organic honey or the probiotics in a good organic honey? But the fact is there is a process that can get organic honey into a bar and it's far different than and the free radical generating nutrient destroying intense long term pasteurization processes that most food manufacturers use in their packaged products. Instead, what you can do, and there's a process to do, this is exactly what I wanted to do in a bar, is you simply heat the organic honey in the bar at about 60 degrees Celsius for just a few minutes. So rather than undergoing hours of processing it this very high heat, you get a very friendly heating process and this mild browning that actually increases the total antioxidant capacity of the honey. So you're concentrating the antioxidants without damaging the probiotics or the enzymes or everything else that you're looking for in a good organic honey. And the cool thing is this is something a lot of people don't realize. Honey, especially along with grass fed gelatin, is an all natural binder. And this means that coming full circle to that nasty IMO synthesized starch inulin that I mentioned earlier, that can spike your blood sugar for hours on end, but the FDA still allows to be added to so called low net carb energy bars. You don't get any of that when you use honey because it's an all natural binder. You don't need any other artificial fillers, you don't need any other artificial binders. And especially when you add in the extensive amount of fiber that you get from the almonds and the cocoa nibs and the white chia seeds, that also lowers the need for any IMO or inulin based starch. It lowers the glycemic index of a bar even more and it results in this non significant, you know, deleterious high carb response to a bar. When you add honey along with the gelatin, the almonds, the cocoa nibs, the white chia seeds, it's a match made in heaven. And the best thing is you also get all the ancestral nutrient density of a natural sweetener like organic honey.

You know what stands out most to me and when you say that, say the make the ancestral mention there is. I grew up in a health conscious family. My parents had like a health food store and we grew up eating real food and we didn't really get to eat bars growing up, but I always saw them as like this weird thing, like I have no idea how it's made. When I like hear you list these things, chia seeds, all these different forms of chocolate almonds with honey. And I can imagine it being mixed in a bowl and actually like making this. It's like real food. It's not some weird bizarre thing made off at a lab.

Well, you look pretty good in a Martha Stewart apron. So we'll make that happen. I'll send you a nice stainless steel bowl and a spatula and an apron. You can trial this yourself or you.

Can try the new home energy bar kit.

Try Angela's new Home Energy bar kit. That's right. Okay, I'm not done yet. I know I'm getting kind of long in the tooth here, but there's a couple of other things that I want to mention when it comes to energy bars. And the first is this idea of recovery. Recovery. And this is something that I know some people are aware of and potentially worried about. And that would be this idea that antioxidants, especially concentrated amounts of synthetic antioxidants, because I talked about how, you know, chia seeds and almonds and cacao nibs and everything else have these natural, preserving and frankly, recovery enhancing antioxidants. But a lot of people are concerned about, you know, blunting the physiological response, response to strength training or, you know, blunting the hormetic response to exercise, which frankly, a very high intake of synthetic antioxidants like vitamin C or vitamin E can do. But at the same time, you actually want the free radical scavenging and the healing effect and the immune modulating effect of antioxidants. But preferably you want them from whole food sources. And if you look at the total antioxidant capacity from blending high antioxidant ingredients like organic honey and almonds and cocoa nibs and kaniwa and white chia seeds and chocolate liqueur, you get an antioxidant profile that is through the fricking roof, but that is from all natural whole food based antioxidants. This means that all these antioxidants, along with all the flavanols from the cocoa particularly, they do double duty. They maximize the amount of free radical scavenging, decreasing oxidative stress, which is what you want. But you don't want to blunt the hormetic response to exercise. So you need to ensure that your antioxidants are coming from a whole food source. And that's important. The other thing, though, that kind of flies under the radar is the idea that anytime you take an antioxidant and you combine it with a rich protein source such as gelatin, you maximize the amino acid bioavailability of the protein source. This is why I put a big squeeze of half of a lemon into my morning smoothie. When I make my morning smoothie and the main liquid in addition to the half squeeze of the lemon is typically bone broth, because vitamin C from lemons combined with the gelatin from the bone broth is a perfect combination for maximizing the bioavailability of the protein. So when you put a bunch of antioxidants, specifically whole food antioxidants, not synthetic chemical based antioxidants, not huge amounts of vitamin C or vitamin E all by themselves, but the natural whole food balanced amount of antioxidants that you're going to find in real food. And you combine that with gelatin, you take the protein and you essentially upgrade or supercharge the protein. So that's the idea behind antioxidants. They're not all bad, but you want whole food based antioxidants and ideally you want to combine whole food based antioxidants with some type of gelatin source or some type of collagen source that allows you to maximize the amino acid and the protein bioavailability of the collagen or the gelatin. And so it's a very cool, almost like a food based biohack when you can squeeze all of that into one single package.

Again, it's just amazing how much you can accomplish if you just like do the research like you've done here and apply like real thinking to investigating what, what foods naturally can produce these results together without trying to make up a bunch of artificial or weird concoctions.

Yeah. And by the way, there is one other antioxidant I didn't mention, but there is a chemical called sesamin. It's not really a chemical, it's just a natural food based substance, sesamin. There's one that's very similar, called sesamolin. And both of these substances belong to a group of these beneficial fibers called lignans. Those have a cholesterol lowering effect, they assist with blood pressure control. They're very good sources of a natural form of vitamin E. They've even been shown to prevent the liver from oxidative damage. And you get them, as the name implies, sesame and sesamolin from sesame seeds. So once I found out about this ingredient and the huge amount of, of manganese and calcium and magnesium and iron and phosphorus and zinc, which is wonderful for testosterone levels in men, selenium for the thyroid, dietary fiber. All these things that you can get from sesame seeds combined with the fact that I'll often sprinkle sesame seeds on my salad or on my salmon or anything else to get this nice nutty, crunchy taste. I put sesame seeds in there. And when you combine those especially, especially with the kaniwha, you get this amazing mouthfeel and crunch that kind of takes all the cacao nibs and the kanewa and shoves it to the roof even more when it comes to this wonderful, wonderful mouthfeel. So sesame seeds are something I hadn't really seen much before in an energy bar, but they really round out the antioxidant profile and the mouthfeel profile really, really nicely.

So Ben, you've been talking a lot about the mouthfeel, which I love as well. Well, but big picture, what about the flavor? What about the rest of the taste of the bar?

Right, yeah. And like I mentioned, I mean, taste is super important to me. And I want taste without, you know, any of the arsenic laced brown rice syrup and the chemical cocktail of organic agave syrup. I don't want acesulfami, potassium, I don't want sucralose. A lot of people think stevia tastes bitter. I mean, about 30% of people don't get a sweet taste out of stevia. They get a bitter taste out of stevia. I don't want any of the gas or the bloating inducing sugar alcohols because, you know, you see, especially in the low carb industry, erythritol and mannitol and sorbitol and xylitol and lactitol and maltitol. The fact is that in many people those can create gut distress bloating. Especially if you're doing more than one energy bar in a day, it can wind up creating some pretty embarrassing bathroom decommissioning issues. So there is this term used in the food industry called organoleptics. And organoleptics that refers to the aspects of food or water or any other substance and its specific impact on the senses like taste and sight and smell and touch. And I would say that because I like to sound smart and use fancy flavor flavors like, or fancy words like organoleptics. The way that I would describe the organoleptic profile of this bar is that it is this big tasty punch of mouth watering, chocolatey, salty coconut goodness. I mean, when you combine organic honey with that slight bitterness from the unprocessed cocoa nibs, you get this perfect chocolaty flavor. The chocolate liqueur and the coconut flakes give you this rich, slightly sweeter effect. The white chia seeds, the kanewa, the sesame, the almonds, they add in this natural nutty flavor and this natural crisp and bite. And so the final product is this incredibly flavorful, extremely well put together from a taste and a sight and a smell and a touch standpoint with none of the artificial flavors and no artificial sweeteners and no, you know, even, even none of the strange kind of like natural flavors that you see advertised. None of the crap that gets hidden in these. So Called healthy energy bars. But the taste is frigging delicious. I mean, I give this mix to, to my kids. I've given it to a ton of my friends now. I mean, a lot of people are aware I've been kind of beta testing all the ingredients and figuring out how they would all fit into like this perfect energy bar. And I mean, dude, cacao nibs, coconut flakes, almonds, grass fed gelatin, organic honey white chia seeds, sesame seeds, organic pea protein, kanewa cocoa butter, sea salt. I mean, you put all this together and it tastes amazing. I mean, I could live on this mix for days at a time. I mean, previously up to this point, you would find me walking around with a bag of macadamia nuts, a little bit of dark chocolate, some spirulina and chlorella. You know, that's what I call my natural trail mix. I would often throw a little bit of organic sea salt in there as well. And I still will have little trail mixes and things like that that I make. But as far as a done for you solution that I know is 100% guilt free because I freaking made it. And something that won't melt or freeze or turn into a brick in the cold, you know, I've kept it in my sauna for hours on end to see what happens in the heat. I've taken it to Hawaii for hunting trips. I mean, this bar that I've managed to squeeze all the ingredients into, it just, it tastes mind blowing. It's addictively wonderful.

I'm glad you mentioned that last thing about taking it in the sauna because that's the one thing with all these organic ingredients. I mean, the flavor sounds amazing, but that's the other thing with an energy bar is like I don't want to take it on a long run or a bike ride or go skiing and like it turns into a rock hard brick or it melts and it's gross and it's all over my hands. It's like, how are you able to get something that doesn't, doesn't do that, right?

Well, it took two years to develop this formula and this was unheard of from, from all the natural products formulators I talked to and all the people who helped to, to make this bar. Nobody else was, was taking the bar snowboarding and skiing and hiking and putting it in the sauna and taking it into triathlons and, and putting it, you know, out. And I, I raced this thing at 38 degrees below zero and a frigid snowy race in Vermont. I mean, I Refined and I tweaked and I tested this thing because I, like I mentioned at the beginning of this show, I've used a lot of energy bars and I found that even the ones that taste good and have a clean profile from an ingredient standpoint, they just haven't been frickin field tested. By people who want to live an adventurous life and by exercise enthusiast and by people who want to slip it into their bike jersey without getting this big greasy gooey pile. And people who want to want a bar that's not going to crumble on impact or fall apart or freeze or melt or create, you know, any other frustrating scenario that results in this giant annoying mess when all you want is clean packaged energy. So yeah, I mean I annoyed a lot of people in the creation of this particular ingredient, but blend. Because I kept testing it over and over and over again. But after two years of researching and testing and formulating and tasting and blending together what I would consider to be some of the most unique superfoods on the face of the planet, you know, the mouth watering and gut nourishing and guilt free final product is well worth it. I mean, I've been working for a long time on creating this and it really is, you know, it's finally ready. I mean, there are boxes of these in the warehouse ready. It's just done. And I'm incredibly proud. I mean, I was tickled pink when I got my first box and was able to open it and feed it to my kids and my wife. And it's just like after so much testing and so much tasting and so much researching and so much comparing and a lot of work, I mean, as you know, Angelo, it's very, very tough to bring a healthy food like this to market. I mean, it's ready, it's done. I mean, if people are listening in right now, they can taste this thing for themselves.

And just speaking from, I mean, an operations and a marketing perspective, trying to create this and back it up, it has been really one of the most rigorous experiences that I've been through because of your standards, Ben. And I just want to thank you for again, like I said, I came from a health background and all of our team and we all like, we all want to eat well and we all have that value. But having a crazy person like you that can actually figure out how to put this type of thing together and make it a real product, we do, man. I mean, with them now in the office, like we're eating them a lot, I don't want to say how much?

I mean, yeah, my, you know when we've been packing the kids for camps this summer. Summer. And sending them off to wilderness survival camp and mom and I are leaving for Seattle and Miami next week and we'll be packing for the airplane. I mean it's so easy. I don't even have to glance at the label. I just grab these bars, I know they're going to taste amazing. I know during two days of travel I can eat four or five of them and feel fine and not have to stop and spend 11 bucks at the healthy food store at the airport. Everything about them. And I know, and you know, my apologies, Angelo. I know I was, I was very difficult to work with during the formation of this stuff because I did want it to be perfect. But that's, I mean that's what Kion is that, that's what not just the, this Kion bar, but that's what the entire company stands for is clean, unique formulations that aren't just healthy and don't just accomplish for you exactly what they are intended to accomplish accomplish for you. Whether that's you know, an anti aging skin serum or the gut nourishing colostrum or you know, the neurotransmitter and recovery enhancing amino acids or the completely pure and incredibly antioxidant rich organic coffee. I mean every single thing that I create I want to be known for as being something that is functional, that is guilt free, that is tested in the trenches. And, and that's, that's what this is. I mean, and it's very, very simple. I mean we, we just call it the Kion Clean Energy Bar. The Keon Clean Energy Bar. And you know, and frankly when you get this bar and the box arrives at your house, even the freaking box and the label and the packaging and I think you'd probably agree with me on this, Angelo. It's just fun. I mean it's, it's just a cool looking bar. My kids absolutely love, love it. It's almost like a cartoon kind of the design on the bar and I mean the whole thing, start to finish, is just an experience. And that's what I wanted to create for people, was not just functional energy, but a full experience when it comes to mouthfeel and flavor and appetite satiation and you know how it feels and crinkles and when you open it, it's slightly flexible but it doesn't fall apart. And when you bite into it, I mean you just get this chocolatey, coconutty, nutty explosion in your mouth. I mean it's just, I'm incredibly proud of it and I don't want to drone on. I realize at this point, you know, I'm starting to sound like a giant commercial, but ultimately, I think we should just tell people where they can go get this thing right now if they want to try it, and where they can leave questions if they have them.

Fill them in, Ben.

All right. So as I know this happened with our coffee. As soon as I announced it was ready, it kind of sold out really fast. So I, I cannot guarantee at the time that you hear this podcast that we aren't going to be completely sold out of these things because they're already beginning to fly off the shelves like freaking hotcakes. But if you want to get in, well, the getting is good. The URL is getkion.com/bar. So Kion is K I O N as in, you know, it's all based around the concept of key life force energy, chakra, prana. This idea that there is this invisible life force that surges through all of us. And this bar definitely feeds that life force. You're gonna, you're gonna feel wonderful, wonderful after you eat it because it's just, it's clean, no gut bomb. Wonderful flavor, but it's getkion.com bar get K-I-O N and again, if you want the show notes and all the research and all that jazz and you don't just want to, you know, grab some, some chocolatey, nutty goodness, but you're a nerd and you want to read all the research, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com bar BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bar if you want any of that stuff from the research on chia seeds or raw honey or cacao nibs or anything like that, because I really do stink by the actual studies behind the products that I create. But if you just want to grab the bar and start chomping away on it, go to getkion.com bargetk I o n.com bar we're launching with a pretty significant 20% discount on these. You can get six boxes, you can get three boxes. You can get one box. There's discounts on any of those options, but ultimately, head over there, grab a bar. Getkeon.com bar you can leave the comments if you have comments on this particular show. As usual, show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bar we have an incredible customer service team standing by via both phone and email if you need it. And that's right There on the bar page@getkion.com bar so there's your two URLs for the show notes. Go to BenGreenFitness.com bar where there will also be a link to the bar. Or to just grab. Grab the bar and get started on it. Go to getkion.com bar that's getk I-O-N.com bar and dude, Angela, I mean, that's. That's everything I wanted to cover as far as energy bars go. Unless you have even, even more questions for me.

No, man, that was amazing. So fun. I want to come back. I want to do this again for more products and more science and just hear you break it all down.

I am happy to have. Have you interview me. We probably don't do this enough like actually have me interviewed about these products that I create because I'm so busy interviewing other people that I'm probably remiss on being interviewed myself on my own show. But yeah, we should do it more. We could do it more. If you guys want me to get interviewed more about this kind of stuff, just leave a comment@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bar and I can tell you guys about the colostrum formulation, the amino acids formulation. I mean, if you like to geek out on this stuff, just let me know. I don't. I don't want to. I don't want my podcast to turn into like a commercial for my products. That's my fear. But if this is helpful for you, just from a pure knowledge standpoint, let me know and I'll. I'll make it happen. I do have a request for you though, Angelo.

Let's do it, man. What is it?

And that would be. Can. Can you either loop or beatbox this podcast to a grand finale?

Yeah, man, for sure. I mean, are you gonna sing on top of it?

It. I. If. If you've got something. I know, I. I'll do it. Yeah. And this. This is unrehearsed, by the way. You guys. I didn't tell anything.

I think you just got to. You just got to. You just got to sing a Keon Bar hook. Dude, you got it. Go for it.

It's big tasty punch. Oh, you know what?

I forgot, dude. It's not going to work because our. Our. We're not like synced like time wise.

That's true. Why don't you just. Why don't you just do something? I was going to take a starting to sound.

All right. All right, here we go.

Until next time. I'M Ben Greenfield, along with Angelo Keeley, COO of Keon, signing out from BenGreenfield Fitness.com have an amazing week. All right, editor. Have fun with that one.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast cast. Go to BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.