For those of us that workout and are looking to get healthy or stay healthy maintaining what we have the most difficult part to this process is nutrition. There’s an absolutely huge array of information and recommendations for what is best to consume especially when it comes to snacking. It’s extremely easy for a new brand to come to market, being loud and bright about a new healthy snack and then when reading the small print, the nutritional information leaves you feeling underwhelmed with the sugars, salts and carbs it contains. This is how a lot of protein bars have presented themselves in market. However, there is a new protein source coming to the fort, beef biltong. Biltong has many nutritional benefits and is a superb protein replacement for reducing your protein bars. Here is where you find out everything you need to know about why biltong can be your new healthy nutritional snack.
Natural Source of Protein
Firstly, when you compare a protein bar against biltong, which do you think is a natural source of protein? A protein bar is factory created and stuffed with all the required apparent healthy nutrition we need. Whereas biltong which originates from South Africa is natural beef sourced from only grass-fed cows, it’s cured for a number of days with different flavours of spices then it’s ready for consumption. It’s obvious which of the two are a natural sourced item. When biltong is slow dried for a few days, it actually loses 55% of its weight and what this does to the beef is enhance the nutrition as the protein almost doubles. 100g of beef steak can contain about 25g of protein, once gone through the slow drying process that happens with biltong, it can up to 50g plus of protein. Then a typical protein bar at 100g contains on average 30g worth of protein. There are the numbers for you in black and white.
High in Protein
When we workout and exhaust ourselves, we break down our muscle fibres, which need to repair themselves. That is why we’re all after high in protein sourced nutritional snacks. If you’re an advocate of protein bars and have been for a while, its likely because they’ve been around for a while and like they say on the wrapper they a high source of protein, however, as you’ve read already above, there are better ways of achieving your daily protein goals. Biltong completely blows protein bars out the water when it comes to protein and it’s all mostly natural, so your body climatises to it right away, with the taste and lightness of it. Where protein bars can be quite thick and stodgy, meaning you’re getting used to something new your body hasn’t encountered before especially if you’re new to it.
Taste
Protein bars come in all types of shapes, sizes, brands, flavours and more. And a lot of the variation is not just down to brands being innovative to offer something different. It’s mainly due to the fact they taste different to a normal bar you’ve likely had, so new flavours were needed to find the best tasting protein bar to consume protein in the nicest way possible. With all the ingredients thrown in, brands really needed to find the best tasting recipe. However, with biltong, the spice flavouring is slow dried into the beef itself, naturally, now it’s possible to find flavours such as garlic, peri peri, chilli chutney and more. These are created with natural flavours to make taste buds explode.
The Ingredients
Biltong being a natural sourced high protein snack has everything to do with the ingredients. Which in a typical 100g bag of biltong you’ll find high protein at 50g and above, low sugar, low salt, low carbs and spice flavourings. That’s it. That’s usually the bulk of ingredients that goes into biltong. However, with protein bars, you’re looking at a lot more ingredients. I kid you not, I found a protein bar, a caramel nut flavour protein bar to be exact that contained over 40 ingredients which is a lot of different ingredients to have in a 100g healthy snack. At that point, you really don’t know what your consuming.
It’s clear to see that biltong, is a natural high protein, tasty snack which everyone should be giving a go. So, don’t waste any time, give it a chance now and see how you can enhance your nutrition.
