By Dr. Luke Tolley,
Identifying Fake Chocolate
Since people like chocolate, for many years food producers have looked for ways to make chocolate cheaper. This has led to many products that look like they use chocolate, but if you pay attention they are labeled as âchocolateyâ or they use the word âfudgeâ. They donât use the word âchocolateâ. The reason why is that chocolate has a specific legal definition and the stuff that they are using doesnât meet it. Instead they use a brown substance whose flavor is inspired by chocolate and call it fudge or chocolatey, hoping that you donât notice.
So what is this fake chocolate that they use? The main difference is primarily in the fat that they use. As I mentioned, real chocolate has cocoa butter as its main fat. Cocoa butter is unusual as a fat because at room temperature itâs quite hard, but it melts at just below body temperature to a thin liquid. This is why you can get the good snap of a well-tempered chocolate bar, and yet it will still melt beautifully in the mouth. Most fats start softer and melt gradually. This means that if you used one of them to try to replace cocoa butter, you would have a bar that doesnât have that snap and wouldnât melt in your mouth the right way. Often the melting point isnât right, so you get that waxy feel in your mouth when you eat them.
Conclusion
The fractionated palm kernel oil is cheaper than cocoa butter, so they add this and other compounds to enhance the chocolate flavor and end up with a compound coating. For these reasons, compound coatings are easier to work with and much cheaper than real chocolate, though not nearly as nice to eat. However, I must admit that most other protein bars still wouldnât be great even if they used real chocolate, but it would make them better.
As you can tell, Iâm not a big fan of fake chocolate. In my mind, the extra cost and effort of real chocolate are totally worth it to get the tasting experience that canât be achieved any other way. This is one of the many reasons that the Blue Unicorn bar is the best protein bar on the market.
By Dr. Luke Tolley, PhD in Chemistry (North Carolina) and former professor, Southern Illinois University
Protein comes from the Greek word protos, meaning first. This shows how important it is to life. We think of protein as making up our muscles but, though it does do that, it is so much more important. It holds our bodies together (collagen), makes our hair and nails (keratin), carries oxygen (hemoglobin), fights disease (antibodies) and facilitates essential chemical reactions (enzymes). Nobody knows for sure, but it is estimated that humans have more than 500,000 different types of protein. It is critical in every stage of life, so you can see that itâs much more essential than just for âbulking upâ. So how much do we need of this essential nutrient? Before I can answer that question, we need to review a few things about proteins.
Protein In The Human Body
Proteins are made of long chains of amino acids. Though there are a bunch of different kinds of amino acids, there are nine that humans canât survive without. The others are ones that we can make ourselves, at least to a certain extent. These nine are called the essential amino acids and a protein that contains all nine is called a complete protein. Itâs difficult to measure the bodyâs need for protein directly, so scientists have taken advantage of the fact that proteins are the bodyâs main source of nitrogen. In order to determine the minimum protein that people need, what they did was feed volunteers a protein-free diet for a short period of time and then measure the amount of nitrogen that they excreted. This would give them an idea of the amount of protein that couldnât be ârecycledâ in the body and would need to be replaced to simply maintain the status quo. This was called obligatory nitrogen loss. According to a study by the World Health Organization (1985), obligatory nitrogen losses averaged 0.053 grams per kilogram of body weight. Since nitrogen is ~16% of a proteinâs weight, this means that we need a minimum of 0.33 grams per kilo of weight of protein to keep from wasting away. For a person weighing 70 kg (~154 lb) this translates into at least 23 grams of protein each day.
Minimum Protein Intake
Remember that this amount is the absolute minimum needed, if you assume a perfect protein that is completely digested and absorbed and has the exact ratio of amino acids that humans need.
After taking digestibility, utilization and other factors into consideration, the government came up with a recommended amount of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight (0.36 grams per pound). If you look at this number, you can see that eating this much protein should keep you from wasting away. For the previous example of a 70 kg person, this would mean a daily protein intake of 56 grams of protein a day is the minimum recommended amount. You can also see that this much protein wonât tip the scales into the lean, fat-burning physique range though.
Conclusion
While there is no solid consensus as far as how much protein we should eat each day, many nutritionists believe that we should consume significantly more high-quality protein than the minimum recommended amount, and I agree. The Blue Unicornâą bar contains 15 grams of high-quality protein that can be a great way to increase the amount of protein in your diet.
WHO (World Health Organization). 1985. Energy and Protein Requirements. Report of a Joint FAO/WHO/UNU Expert Consultation. Technical Report Series 724. World Health Organization, Geneva.
