Quest Keto Products - thoughts?

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #21

Because shady ass companies take an unrelated fiber, say, oat fiber, and add it to a carby ingredient, then do some fucked up math to trick you. Beware.

Have you ever heard of the Julian Bakery scandal?

I’m with @ChiTownEdge on this.

(Nick) #22

Yes. There are some liars and sociopaths who commit fraud, like Julian Bakery. But this doesn’t change chemistry truth for those who make products and aren’t fraudsters :slight_smile:

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #23

Lol @ "sociopaths’ Haha!

(Nick) #24

I’m serious. I can’t think of a better way to describe a group of people who knowingly and repeatedly endanger ill and desperate people for a quick buck, like Julian Bakery did.

It’s doubly damaging, because it also tarnishes honest people who make properly formulated products, who then get tarred with the same brush.

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #25

Yeah. That was quite a scandal. I was right in the middle of my low carb journey when that happened. The uproar in the low carb community was epic!

(Arlene) #26

Doesn’t this perfectly describe big food companies and big pharma? Yep!

(Dustin Cade) #27

it’s hard to trust any company really… as much as i would love to see awesome keto lines coming to market, how much could we trust they are what the claim?

(Nick) #28

I wouldn’t trust; I would test: with glucometer, keto-analyser and waist-measurement, inter-alia! :wink:

(Nick) #29

There’s a reason why the highly-respected Dr Peter Gotzsche’s book about Pharma is entitled “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare”.

He’s no quack or weird cultist. He’s one of the fathers of modern evidence-based medicine. But the more he looked, the more profoundly shocked he became at what he found in the upper echelons of the pharmaceutical companies. His book, together with Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma and Dr Malcolm Kendrick’s Doctoring Data will make you realise that much of modern medicine’s evidence base has itself founded on quicksand.

(Arlene) #30

After reading your imput, I went online and watched a talk Dr. Peter Gotzche gave in Denmark. I had to watch the subtitles because he was not speaking english, but it was very informative. I am never surprised by these kind of facts. It is obvious to me all the corruption in the medical industry. I am more surprised by the huge number of people who still blindly trust everything their doctor says, without doing any research on their own. This truly baffles me. We all need to be our own advocates. We all need to take responsibility for our own health. Isn’t that just living wisely?

(Mel) #31

I appreciate your reply, I think it touches on something important within the Quest objective. I think your assessment is accurate, that Quest’s target demo is the athelete vs. the average person who is overweight and may or may not be mild-moderately active (though I believe they can be consumed by our demo if the person is informed and can make it fit their macros). I mean, if you go on their website they mention bodybuilders and fitness competitors specifically!

My social circle is pretty active, and I’m the more inactive in that I only play rec sports 1-2x a week and “work out” maybe 1-2x weekly (I put quotation marks on it because their warm ups are about as tough as my workouts). I have friends & family members who are hobbyist as well as competitive weight lifters, marathon runners, crossfitters, athletes and you’re SPOT ON! Keto, Lower carb/Paleo/Whole 30 with a trend to less and less carbs is the norm now. Low carb IS getting traction …but for many of them “low” is between 50-100g, which they’d prefer to get from higher carb veggies instead of a protein bar but sometimes life comes at you fast and you need a portable protein bump. Over in /r/ketogains on reddit, you will find people who’ve been keto atheletes for years and the amount of carbs they can consume and still stay in ketosis is astounding to me. 50-60g really? if I go over half that, I’m knocked out. I’m not sure Quest products would make the slightest dent to them.

To address what other posters have brought up: I don’t think these products are designed with keto in mind, but they’re glad to take our money anyway. It’s not mentioned anywhere in their literature, they seem really careful to stick to just “low carb” terms with a lot of “clean eating” and “whole food” buzzwords, which is eeeeeeverywhere in the superfit community. For most people, under 100g is considered “low carb”. I don’t think the brand is out to deceive, swindle, or cheat ketoers in the slightest. If they were, they’d be plastering “keto” everywhere.

(Michelle) #32

I thought this was very informative on how the quest keto products came about:

http://www.thelivinlowcarbshow.com/shownotes/15751/1220-victoria-adelus-is-on-a-quest-to-make-quality-keto-foods-accessible/

(Jane Reed) #33

Michelle, that episode of LLVLC was so interesting, particularly that Quest originated with Ketopets. They rescued dogs suffering from cancer, fed them Ketogenic diets, found that many recovered completely.

(Michelle) #34

Yes, totally agree. I love that they rescued pets that were going to be euthanised and saved them with keto. I’m a big animal lover, so thought that was great. Also, how quest keto was organically grown into keto business and finding out about how their labeling is top of the industry.

(Jane Reed) #35

It was just this podcast that spurred me to buy a can (at $1.50) of no-grain canned cat food to try on my 3 pets. None of them liked it, including DJ who will eat anything. They already eat grain free dry food but get a little run-of-the-mill canned food every morning. I should go entirely grain free, but in the past they have turned up their noses at raw or cooked chicken and raw ground beef. Junk food junkies, I guess.

(Meeping up the Science!) #36

Mm.

I think we look at certain foods as being a convenience, but in reality we still are working to earn the money, or utilizing other resources to obtain them. They aren’t all that convenient after the fact.

Having said that, I don’t necessarily care if people buy processed food. The issue I have with it is that it tends to be hyperpalatable, and you do not know what they are making the food with. Many claims turn out to be false, see Julian Bakery, and you may be getting additives, plastic, etc. Of course, with the regular whole food supply there are those risks as well to varying degrees.

Any time we give up control, whether to doctors or to corporations, we lose as consumers and individuals.

So I wouldn’t worry about Quest foods really if those things don’t matter to you. If anyone has been a food addict ever, it’s probably best to avoid all processed food in the long run. However, everyone is different and all that jazz.

(Nick) #37

@Donna - fair enough, but we need to be precise what we mean by “processed”. All food is, to one degree or another, processed. Even fresh meat is butchered, hung etc. Cheese is very processed - and very carefully so. So I think it’s helpful to think not of “processing” as the demon, but of problematic processes - for example, I would much rather have a massively “processed” Quest Bar than a bag of “unprocessed” dates. I know which would be more metabolically harmful, because I’ve measured!

(Meeping up the Science!) #38

Just because something is processed doesn’t mean it’s bad, however they are, by and large, hyperpalatable, meaning they are easy to overconsume. And yes, even Quest bars, are intentionally designed (obviously) to be quite palatable in this fashion. I actually don’t dislike them, as Quest bars get moldy easily, which I count as a good sign, as they have fewer additives that are negative than other products. That is part of why I stopped consuming them, though. I used to have at least 1-2 a day.

By processed foods I mean the internet forum vernacular: any food packaged for resale by a company that is not in its whole form. Quest bars are absolutely hyperpalatable - people even bake them into cookies. Does that make them “bad”? Not necessarily. For food addicts it’s best to avoid them, I feel. For everyone else, not necessarily, as I mentioned above. And yes, I’d argue it is not beneficial that packaged food companies try to make their products delicious in many ways, because that is used to foster dependence on their product.

While dates are high in sugar, typically in the cultures that cook them, they don’t eat a whole bag. I grew up with bags of dates and figs. My grandmother might have 2-3 a day - not super low carb, but also not a sugar bomb of epic proportions, either. One date has 5g of carbs, actually. There are times when I’ve had 1-2 dates sometimes for breakfast (rarely) with my meal, and still met my macros. 1-2 dates is of minimal impact biologically. As for one quest bar? I have no idea, but the protein in them also adds to glucose load. All sugar isn’t evil and all fruit isn’t evil - the amount that most of us eat is.

I would argue that isn’t necessarily worse to put one 1-1.5 teaspoons of sugar in 14 ounces of coffee if that’s all you were consuming, for instance, than 4-6 packets of splenda for a variety of reasons. The issue is that no one stops at a teaspoon. You could easily have 1 teaspoon of sugar a day and stay in ketosis, depending on what else you ate - the same with a date, 2-3 slices of apple, etc. The problem is that few people stop there.

I have nothing against Quest personally, and if you’re going to eat processed and packaged meals they are probably one of the top choices. I still would avoid them in cases of chronic food addiction and overconsumption. If it’s that or a bowl of pasta they aren’t a bad option, sure.

Again, it’s largely a personal decision. I think there tends to be a better correlation between food preparation vs. convenience food health-wise. However, we should always be aware that corporations do not have our health in mind, and that other than sending stuff to a lab, we don’t have much in the way of verifying their claims. I’ve been low carb since the early 2000s, and many companies were found to have dubious claims about ingredients and the like.

And of course, food we cook is also processed, too! It is a good point. However, tl:dr - to clarify, I mean company packaged foods which are strictly made for convenience.