#collagenandlies
11 g Protein | Grass-fed Collagen | Non-Gmo
Net carbs: 14 g Sugars: 8 g
Overall rating: 🚫🤬🙅♂️
Flavor
Nope. If you wanted flavor, you came to the wrong place, my friends.
This collagen bar just tastes like lies. The chocolate flavor is minimal, and mostly you get the soggy wet egg flavor that dominates many collagen protein bars.
It makes this section of the review much easier if there’s an actual flavor to examine. Wet eggy cardboard is not enough for me to work with.
I would definitely recommend this product if you want to lose weight. You’ll probably choose air over this bar given the option. Similarly to the Primal kitchen collagen bar, chewing it is a workout in and of itself so you might burn some calories during the act of consumption.
I’m guessing that Caveman’s target market is essentially modern cavemen who have few thoughts unrelated to working out or fucking. For these guys, food is simply a vehicle for protein, and it’s even better if that protein has a trendy health supplement attached to it.
The problem is, you can find collagen protein bars that taste better, have more protein, and are made of healthier ingredients. Do not buy Caveman collagen bars.
Packaging appeal
This is run-of-the-mill Target-brand boxer brief level graphic design. Many protein bars seem to reuse the same Adobe illustrator templates for their designs.
Here they’ve hit all the important tropes for food packaging:
Big callout to the supplement upon which you’ve based your business model. Overprocessed photos of ingredients. Nutrient amounts and some kind of virtue signalling.
Food marketers know that the average consumer responds well to trendy buzzwords and doesn’t read the ingredients. That’s how they use words like Paleo and Non-gmo to communicate health to unwitting consumers while they fill their products with collagen and lies.
There are advantages to anonymity for protein bars. If you follow the standard template, then consumers might confuse your product for another healthier option.
Ingredient quality
Tapioca is a highly questionable food additive. These shitty protein bars have tapioca syrup and tapioca fiber. We’ll talk about the syrup first.
Cassava, a starchy root crop eaten in Africa and many island nations, is the source of tapioca. Manufacturers turn cassava into tapioca syrup by grinding it into starchy powder then performing hydrolysis by adding enzymes to it. Here’s what that process looks like:
The end result is glucose syrup. Tapioca syrup is an industrially processed sweetener. There’s even evidence that some tapioca syrup is made of “waste slurry” from the production of other tapioca products.
Tapioca syrup is barely different from corn, brown rice, or agave. All of them are high-calorie sweeteners that push you closer to pre-diabetes with every drop you consume. There is also inadequate research on its health impacts, and I believe a lot of manufacturers hide behind this lack of information.
The fiber version of tapioca has come up before during the snack-vestigations. This is an important ingredient to anyone seeking that sweet blissful ketosis we’ve all been hearing about.
Sugar is anathema to ketosis, but a lot of food manufacturers want to abuse sugar’s addictive qualities without having to be honest about its health impacts. So ingredient producers invent substances like “Tapioca fiber” that sound innocuous.
Tapioca fiber is an isomaltooligosaccharide, which is a type of polysaccharide. In plainer english: this is a long chain of smaller sugar molecules. For some reason, the FDA does not require manufacturers to list this as a sugar even though that’s what it is.
Nobody knows what tapioca is, but everyone knows we usually discuss fiber as a nutritional net positive. Companies like Caveman take advantage of this ignorance and use sweeteners like tapioca fiber to hoodwink neanderthal consumers.
Nutritional ethics
I’m always curious about what paths lead people to put this kind of shit in food. Why is it that I created a snack with simple natural ingredients while all these other companies go straight for refined processed additives?
A lot of common food additives are industrial products that scientists decided were only minimally poisonous, and thus acceptable for sale to the uneducated peasants roaming through our overstocked supermarkets. Take canola oil for example, which was originally used as lamp fuel and engine lubricant.
It actually makes perfect sense when I read magazines like Prepared Foods or Nutritional Outlook. These marketing rags give endless coverage to the food additive manufacturers who pay their bills through advertising.
These magazines write about unhealthy additives with the same placid, lobotomized admiration that MSNBC brings to any story about Nancy Pelosi. It’s not their jobs to be critical, it’s their job to rework industry press releases into mildly entertaining articles about seaweed extract and the latest CBD seltzer for your pet alpaca.
Company practices
Caveman sells lies to stupid consumers. I know it sounds harsh, but it is patently stupid to eat any processed food without cross-examining the ingredients first.
The FDA doesn’t do much to protect our health or wellbeing. It’s up to corporations and consumers to do most of the regulation. If it’s not immediately poisonous, then the FDA probably allows it in your food.
I have no respect for companies like Caveman. They virtue-signal health using words like paleo, even though their products are about as far from Paleo as you can get.
Paleo at it’s core is about eating simple whole foods that neanderthals may have eaten. I wasn’t there, but I’m pretty sure industrial food processing facilities didn’t exist during the paleolithic era. Any processed food company that calls its products Paleo is lying to you and probably themselves.
This is why I say Caveman’s protein bars are full of #collagenandlies
Snackability
This is a suitable snack for donkeys, goats, and cockroaches.
Overall, Caveman Collagen Protein Bars get a rating of 🚫🤬🙅♂️
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