Would Amanda Eat It?

Spoiler alert: Amanda already ate it.  But wait – don’t go just yet!  The question here is – would Amanda eat it again?

Last night I found myself in a position lots of us face – I’d had a biggish lunch and wasn’t super hungry for dinner, but knew that not eating from roughly noon until the next morning was horrific for the metabolism.  Couple this with the fact that I was facing a 2+ hour drive back from Palm Springs and didn’t want to stop to chow down on something along the way.

What’s fast, portable, and relatively healthy, I asked myself?  And then I saw the display:

I’d of course heard about Quest bars from every single health and lifestyle blogger on the face of the Earth.

I have a bodybuilder friend who breaks them up and eats them with unsweetened almond milk for breakfast.  I have friends who crumble them over Greek yogurt and call it pizza.  I know people who Amazon order these in CASES to their private homes.

It’s threat-level red on these damn things, and here I am never having eaten one.

Don’t worry, Quest fans, I threw it down in the 7-11 last night.  And here’s my report:

The good:

• 1g sugar.  ONE.  That’s plain-Cheerios-level low.
• 17g fiber.  SEVENTEEN.  That’s more than FOUR CUPS of blueberries.
• 21g protein.  TWENTY…ok you get it.  More than 4 oz. canned tuna.
• Lower in calories than almost any other comparable-protein bar out there – 190 cals
• I gotta hand it to ’em, the chocolate chip taste and texture is on point

The bad:

• Lots of “unpronounceables” – think fake sweeteners like sucralose, erythritol, and isomalto-oligosaccharides (yep, that’s a single word and thing)
• The overall taste of the bar is a little…off.  There’s a persistent metallic-y aftertaste that doesn’t really go away until well after you’re done eating the bar.
• At the end of the day, this is a processed lump of a bar built to resemble food without actually having any food ingredients to speak of (which is why it didn’t, to be polite, “sit well” with me for the long drive home, if you get my drift)

The verdict:

• Let’s be honest – this is one of the healthiest things you can buy at a 7-11, outside the obvious (hard-boiled eggs, apples, low-sodium beef jerky).  So  if I was in a situation like I described above, or on a road trip, or a busy mom needing a quick snack, or looking for something to hold me over until my next meal – YES, I would eat a Quest bar (although I’d like to try other flavors, too).

The alternative:

• Should you want to stick to real food (something I recommend to all of my clients and try to do myself), you can make a pretty decent high-protein bar, shake, or snack without the powder with this handy-dandy cookbook
• You can also make your own Quest bars, which doesn’t eliminate the chemical nature of the bar, but does lessen the impact on your pocketbook (these things ain’t free, people)

I know Quest fans far and wide are breathing a sigh of relief (ha) – their addiction is TFB-approved!

For those of you who eat whole and clean – what’s your favorite label-free protein source? (mine is hard-boiled eggs for SURE!)