After adopting a carnivore or carnivore-adjacent diet, navigating everything from your daily routine to your social life can be challenging. This can be understatement when it comes to traveling and maintaining your diet with travel-friendly foods.
If you plan on travelling somewhere soon, be it half way around the world or for a weekend hike, your mind might turn to jerky as a go-to supply to stock up on. You may want to think twice about jerky as your only option, and continue reading for an even better diet travel companion.
Jerky on the Road
The term jerky is derived from the Quechua word “ch’arki,” which translates to dried, salted meat. In order to make jerky, the curation process includes steps to dehydrate lean cut meats trimmed into strips, with some recipes calling for the traditional addition of salt to prevent bacteria from spoiling the meat. The process of curing allows jerky to have a relatively long and stable shelf life without the need for added preservatives usually found in processed foods.
This makes jerky one of the few foods carnivores can find convenience and comfort in when travelling abroad. Even for carnivores looking to camp or hike over a weekend, packing along some jerky seems like a no-brainer. While jerky is filled with plenty of protein and highly bioavailable micronutrients, it’s missing one essential component – fat.
The Fuel Your Body Needs – Fat
When it comes to the energy your body needs and craves, fat (and the right kind) plays a vital role.
Micronutrient Absorption
Fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E require fat so they can be absorbed by the body and utilized for proper hormonal functions. Vitamin A supports your eye and skin health, vitamin D is essential for helping your body to absorb calcium and maintain healthy bones, and vitamin E provides anti-inflammatory and antioxidant functions that may prevent heart disease, cancer, and cognitive decline.
Energy and Satiety
Ghrelin is a hormone in your body responsible for increasing your appetite, while a hormone by the name of leptin is responsible for decreasing it. The roles of these hormones make them incredibly importance in energy balance and your overall satiety throughout the day (in accordance to your macronutrient intake). A large amount of carbohydrates can spike your insulin levels and may cause you to crash and burn or feel fatigued for prolonged periods after your body has used all of the glucose it needs and stores the rest as glycogen. Fat is a critical and preferred source of primary energy as it does not cause insulin spikes or raise your blood sugar levels. This means you can expect a sustainable level of energy throughout your day and keep your leptin and ghrelin level in check (barring your fat intake is coupled with low- or no-carb meals).
Quality Fat
In order for you to reap the benefits of fat, you must choose the right kind. Highly palatable sources of fat in the forms of vegetables oils (think cottonseed, sunflower, canola and so on) are usually paired with refined sugars and carbohydrates – this is the type of fat you want to stay away from. Sticking to natural, nutrient-dense, high-quality sources of fat such as beef tallow is the way to go.
A Superior Step Up From Jerky
As if travelling on a carnivore diet isn’t difficult enough, getting hit with the news that choosing jerky as your travel food of choice is suboptimal can be frustrating, to say the least. So, what’s your next step?
The next step is taking jerky to the next level with a modern twist on an ancestrally-derived food, pemmican. Pemmican combines the two fundamental foods for carnivores — meat (dried into jerky form) and tallow.
Related reading: Check out the composition of The Carnivore Bar here.
North American Indigenous tribes relied heavily on pemmican as a staple while living a nomadic lifestyle for the very reason that it was both incredibly nutritious and non-perishable on travels.
If you were to dive deep into the benefits of pemmican (whether homemade or from a carefully sourced option), you would find:
- Pemmican has more calories compared to jerky alone, giving you more sustainable energy from fat throughout your day (and without bloating) during your busy travels.
- Pemmican packs more vital nutrients compared to jerky alone, including fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E, and K.
- The shelf life, synthetic-preservative-free composition, and portability of pemmican make it the perfect diet travel companion for those on the go.
Pemmican Made for the Modern Day
While pemmican is the superior travel food choice compared to jerky alone, it does pose some issues when it comes to its composition. Pemmican is inconvenient to make at home, especially getting the ratio of jerky and tallow just right. And just when your labor of homemade carnivore love is ready to be eaten at the top of mountain after a gruelling hike, it crumbles into a soft mess that’s hard to eat.
Luckily, that’s where The Carnivore Bar comes in. We’ve created a bar better than pemmican (as outlined in our previous Kickstarter FAQ here) with a crunchy texture, full of high quality ingredients, and solid at room temperature that won’t crumble in your hands.
The Carnivore Bar in Action
For optimal health and fitness on the go, it all comes down to the high-quality fat found in each of our bars. You need a source of energy that is going to be sustain you throughout your entire day without a crash and burn that could come from other travel food bars. This is the only bar on the market specifically designed to meet your nutritional and energy needs in any situation.
Take it from SPC Carrill (88M, 948th TC CO Seaport Ops), a soldier who took an alternate approach from other soldiers and leveraged our convenient and nutrient-dense bars during his Advanced Individual Training (AIT) for the military.
“You can smell the canola spray the second you walk through the DFAC doors. This is why I learned my lesson after basic training and prior to AIT put in a massive order for Carnivore Bars…During one of Bravo companies toughest pt days (carwash hill), I felt energy reserves I've never felt before. My gas tank felt endless.” – Carrill
Related reading: Read SPC Carrill’s full testimonial of The Carnivore Bar here.
Get ahead of your future travels or training and take our quiz to see which bar we’ve created is right for you!
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