(WFN) I was talking to a friend this morning and I was stunned by what I was hearing on the other end of the telephone. My friend, Mariette, is a typical New York mom. She is a film maker who has just completed shooting and is now editing her first feature film; she has a part time job as a company rep at a small TV commercial production company; she is writing the script for her newest creative endeavor and she is raising a young teenage son, Jack, who has a very busy schedule of his own. While we were talking she was on her cell phone while buying groceries at the local vegetable market and trying to find some healthy snacks for a group of Jacks after school friends.
I asked her how she stays on top of it all. She sighed and said “Well, I just don’t eat lunch!” She was half-joking but it’s obvious that the mom’s of today have a different life than the one my mom had. And that makes nutrition even more important for them today than ever before. The temptation to eat something fast is ubiquitous. It seems as if there is a Starbucks, a Pizza Hut, a MacDonald’s or Burger King on every corner of every town in America. And now they all claim to be serving healthier foods which can really be confusing. It’s almost like the Big Bad Wolf inviting the 3 Little Pigs over for dinner. They may not eat you but eventually that stuff can kill you or at the very least make you sick. It certainly isn’t going to lead to health and well being.
Back on the cell, Mariette casually mentioned that she had a snack bar in her purse and that would be her lunch for today. I asked her what kind of snack bar and what kind of nutrition it contained. “I dunno” she said. “I guess they are all the same!” In fact, as I told her, nothing could be further from the truth.
There are snack bars, by which I mean bars you eat to satisfy your appetite, which could include candy bars such as Snickers, Mounds, Zagnut or Butterfingers. That category also includes varieties that seem healthier like Quaker Granola Bars. Then you have your diet bars like those sold by Adkins or the South Beach Diet. You have your energy bars like PowerBar or Ironman Bar which are generally high in caloric content. You have to be careful because all these are formulated for specific needs. One might be high protein low carb, which is great for a bodybuilder but not a runner, or possibly a busy working mom. And many women, like my friend Mariette, eat these nutrition bars as a meal replacement so they need something that contains as much whole food goodness as possible.
One danger is to eat these bars and still have full meals every day. That is one sure way to add additional pounds, especially when many of these bars have high carbohydrate values. According to an article I read on Wikipedia: When too many carbohydrates are eaten, the liver fills up with glycogen (starch which turns to sugar in the body) and still has glucose entering it. The liver will then store the excess glucose as fat, for later use. This is one reason why energy bars work better for athletes and people with active lifestyles.
“They work well for a lot of people,” says Liz Applegate, PhD, author of the Encyclopedia of Sports and Fitness Nutrition and faculty member at the University of California, Davis. “Bars are convenient, and they sure beat eating a bag of pretzels for lunch. If you do better with a restricted diet plan, substituting a meal replacement bar one or two meals a day aids in weight loss.”
But with so many bars on the market, how do you know that you’re picking the right one? “You have to look at the label,” says Applegate. “Women’s bars (such as Luna and Pria) are generally lower in calories. They’re also fortified with a bit more folic acid and calcium than other bars.” The Fission Fruit Bar actually has fewer calories and more protein than the Luna Berry Almond Bar.
One common factor in all of this is taste. People gravitate to the sweet snacks because they taste good. Many times a person will eat a nutrition bar and it tastes lousy and that person thinks that this is normal because anything good for you probably tastes bad. Not necessarily so. There are fruit based bars that are all natural, deliver on the vitamins and proteins you want and still taste delicious. I suggested to Mariette that she try an all natural, fruit based whole food bar.
The problem was that she couldn’t find what I was suggesting at the grocery store. Almost every bar on the shelf there contained sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup. I explained that by going on-line she could find exactly what she wanted and order a selection of bars and it would probably be cheaper that way to boot.
Of course, eating a diet of whole foods and getting a decent amount of exercise is part of living healthy. Mariette cooks wonderful dinners for herself and her son most evenings and she gets to the gym at least 3 days a week. How she does it all is a miracle in my opinion but there are a lot of miraculous women out there doing their thing every day.
Visit www.TrueHealthyProducts.com for more great eating tips and all natural nutritional products.
