Re: [at-l] bagels, PowerBars, Gorp. (Hoo Haa!)

["Thomas McGinnis" <tmcginnis@ucclan.state.in.us>]

Short Story: bagels and powerbars are complex carbohydrate bombs, which provide you with stable calories (digestion-wise), but bagels *may* lack significant fiber, which means a diet heavy in bagels will be light in, ah, well, it'll be light. See below.

>>> "Christopher Wood" <CHRISW@LANDMARKNET.NET> 02/09/00 
a few years ago i read an article on power bars and they were comparing them with bagels does anybody remember if it was backpacker or outside i have looked thru my back mags but cant seem to find it . anybody seen it? 
hoops

######Not bagels exactly, but I did a spreadsheet analysis of standard edition GORPage against a PowerBar. Since bagels are basically a complex carbohydrate bomb (like PowerBars), many of the conclusions would transfer. What I wanted was to justify taking the new-fangled PowerBar on a hike in place of standard gorpage. I *really* wanted this. 

PROCEDURE: I took a PowerBar wrapper and entered the nutritional table into a spreadsheet — the PowerBar became the default. Then I took the labels of salted peanuts, M&Ms, and raisons, and entered their nutritional content into adjacent columns, inserting new rows where needed (not much of a job, since the nutitritional "menu" of a PowerBar is pretty broad. Then I took this standard serving for peanuts or M&Ms or raisons, and scaled it to the gram serving of a PowerBar (63 grams?), so that I had a PowerBar equivalent (by mass) of nutritional punch for each. This, of course went into 3 more columns. Lastly, to develop the PowerBar-equivalent gorp punch, I added them all together, then scaled them 1:1:1, and compared. (So we've got 8 columns used, 1+3+3+1)

FINDINGS: Well, *I* found it fascinating, anyway.
1) GORP, by virtue of the fat in the peanuts and chocolate, is far more calorie dense than the carbo-focused PowerBar.
2) GORP, by virtue of the sodium from the peanuts and the potassium from the raisons, is far more electrolyte dense than the stable calorie-focused PowerBar.
3) GORP, by virtue of the sugars in the chocolate and the raisons, still manages the "quick energy" desired by those whose blood sugar has fallen from exertion.
****There were other good things about gorp which I didn't commit to memory.
4) PowerBars are stable-calorie dense, meaning complex carbohydrates which will provide you with usable energy faster than will fats, but without the sugar buzz/crash of the "simples" found in chocolate. [This would also hold for bagels.]
5) PowerBars, while not packing the salts of gorp, are still vitamin/anti-oxident dense; they're basically like eating a vitamin pill.
6) PowerBars, while being stable-calorie focused, still provide enough fat calories (25%) and fiber to round out the dietary presentation in a marvelously healthy way.

CONCLUSIONS:
1) GORP for hiking. Calorie dense, high impact food, electrolyte bomb.
2) PowerBar for running/training. Stable calories, vitamin/anit-oxident bomb. Great for physical stress.
3) PowerBars might be very handy for the early stages of a throughhike, when the physical stresses of hiking are only slightly different from running a marathon every day. That said, they would add lots more weight (33%) to your early pack weight than the same calorie allotment of gorp. Maybe one per week for that especially nasty climb?

There may be something more in the at-l archives from the fall of '98. Maybe August/September/October.

Have a balanced day,
SloeFuelToe



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