I have a fondness for nutrition bars. There’s just something about the convenience of them that draws me in despite the primal/paleo notion that it’s better for us to eat whole unprocessed foods.
The bar that I’ve been eating most regularly up to this point is the RxBar which I only learned about while doing the Whole 30 challenge. These make for a convenient on-the-go breakfast or pre-training snack.
While RxBar offers many different flavors, the thing that bothered me the most was that each bar contained around 23 grams of carbs, which is quite a lot since I generally try to eat low carb.
If my goal is to eat 100 gm of carbs per day, this would make up more than 20% of my daily intake.
Rudy from Peregrine Nutrition reached out to me to tell me that he was working on a keto and paleo friendly bar and wondered if I wanted to try them out.
My answer of course was hell yes.
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Rudy is a professional distance runner who like me, practices intermittent ketosis and like me, had a hard time finding a bar that was keto friendly.
Unlike me, while I just whined about this to my wife, he went out and developed one of his own.
Most ‘low carb’ bars on the market use some form of sugar alcohol or oligosaccharide type sweetener to enhance sweetness without having to count these towards the ‘net carbs’ on the nutrition label.
It’s now well known that despite having low ‘net carbs,’ in certain populations these bars can still cause a spike in blood glucose and drop in blood ketones (I know because I’m one of these people).
Instead of using these sweeteners, Peregrine Nutrition created an unconventional flavor that comes from cacao, lime, and cayenne: a mix of bitter, tangy, and spicy. Hence the dark chocolate chili lime flavor.
While these three disparate flavors don’t seem like they would mix well, in practice they work really well together and the result is a tasty bar with 8 gm of total carbs and 3 gm of net carbs that won’t spike your glucose or drop your ketones.
When I received the first batch of bars I warned him that I would be sharing the bar with the BJJ Cavewife who is much pickier with things than I am. If he could manage to get her stamp of approval on it, then it’d be quite an accomplishment because she’s hated every single nutrition bar I’ve brought into the house (RxBars are the bars she hates the least).
We both noticed that the bar tasted a little sweet, a little sour, and had a kick in the end. We could both taste a hint of lime which we liked. While I preferred the bar to be less spicy, The BJJ Cavewife liked the spiciness of the bar which was surprising because she typically can’t stand spicy foods. We also agreed that we would prefer the bar to be 5-10% sweeter.
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Rudy took our feedback into account and sent us an updated batch that addressed each of these issues in the second batch he sent us.
This next batch was fantastic! Even the BJJ Cavewife said she would prefer this to the RxBar.
Congratulations Rudy, your bar is now her favorite bar!
We love the fact that the bar that uses 100% organic ingredients:
Macadamia nuts, unsweetened raw cacao, pastured egg (from chickens raised on bugs and grass at a farm just south of our home in Denver, absolutely no grain or soy feed used), grass fed ghee, unsweetened coconut, grass fed beef collagen, chia seeds, pecans, lime juice, cayenne pepper, vanilla extract, Himalayan pink salt, fig, stevia leaf
Here’s the nutritional info:
Calories: 270
Total Fat: 27 gm
Saturated Fat: 12 gm
Total Carbohydrate: 8 gm
Dietary Fiber: 5 gm
Sugars: 2 gm
Protein: 6 gm
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We actually brought some of these bars on a trip and ate them as meal replacements at the airport and found that these kept us full for the entire flight. We were impressed. I’m sure the fat content and lack of an insulin spike played a significant role in our satiety.
This is now my go to bar when eating keto.
If staying in ketosis is important to you and you want the convenience of having a quick bite that you can just slide into your pocket on the way to work, I can’t think of a better snack for you.
Check these bars out yourself at PeregrineNutrition.com
Rudy has kindly offered readers of this blog 20% off of their first purchase with the code: BJJCAVEMAN20
[Disclosure: As I mentioned above, I received samples for review purposes. I was not financially compensated for this post. The opinions are completely my own and the ones that the BJJ Cavewife allows me to have. If you use the promotional code above I get to buy more supplements.]
Thanks for sharing, these were pretty delicious.
Glad you like them too!