An unsolicited, if qualified, product endorsement

Disclaimer: I do not receive any compensation from the company below, nor have I received any free samples or any other consideration from them or from any other agency for this statement.

Now that the legal stuff is out of the way, have you tried Quest protein bars? I'm liking them a lot. There are two different product streams on their website, "99.95% natural" (sweetened with sucralose) and "100% natural" (sweetened with stevia). Unfortunately, my suppliers here in Cave-ville haven't managed to get any of the 100% natural bars in, so I guess I'll have to put up with that 0.05% for a while.

So what's in them? Well, the bar that I just ate (peanut butter and jelly flavour, from their 99.95% natural line) lists the following, in order, as its ingredients: protein blend (why protein isolate, milk protein isolate), isomalto-oligosaccharides, peanut butter, almonds, water, peanuts, natural flavors, sea salt, lo han guo, and sucralose. Other flavours, such as the Chocolate Brownie bar I'm saving for afternoon's snack, don't have peanuts in them.

The nutritional information lists 10g fat, 20g protein, and 21g carbs, of which 17g is listed as dietary fibre. So, with 4g "net carbs" (as the Atkins people say), depending on your particular interpretation of "paleo", these might be worth a look. Of course, if you're following the no-dairy paleo, then the whey and milk proteins would be problematic, and if you're following Mark Sisson's Primal Diet (which says you should be eating less than 100g of all carbs, including fibre), these would be a large chunk of your daily carb. But, I like the fact that there's no soy in them (not even soy lecithin, which is used in a thickener in just about everything), that there's also no aspartame in them, and that the health food store closest to my office generally has most of the "99.95% natural" line in stock. I've already started bugging them to get the "100% natural" line in as well.

They're also available at the Low-Carb Grocery (up in Markham, Ontario, as well as online), which I should also post a review of at some point. (In fact, I thought I already had, but I'm not seeing it in my posts list...)