CrossFitters are among the healthiest eating athletes in the world today. Just look at the 2015 and 2016 fittest woman on earth Katrin Tanja Davidsdottir: the bulk of her diet is vegetables, quality meats, and safe, unprocessed starches. She focuses on wholesome paleo friendly foods and it works for her, there’s no denying that.
But it’s not just the top CrossFit competitors who have such healthy habits. It seems to be a trend that affects a lot of the amateurs all around the world as well. It is simply a part of the CrossFit mentality: a strong body needs high quality, clean fuel.
What does an amateur CrossFitter need to fuel a hard WOD, go to work, have a social life, and still recover well for the next day?
Apart from good sleep, she needs to use every opportunity, every meal and snack, to put as many essential nutrients into her body as she can. High quality, nutrient dense foods are a must. The three main meals of the day are usually manageable; cooking at home or discovering a suitable restaurant should take care of that. The trickier part is nutrition “on the go” and pre- and post- workout fuel. Following an ancestral, paleo type of diet like many CrossFitters do, her choices will be limited; and this is where insects come in.
Insects are a wholesome, nutrient dense food. For example, the increasingly popular cricket has more protein than a wild-caught salmon (by weight), with a complete spectrum of amino acids. Cricket flesh also has more iron than beef, more calcium than milk, and plenty of the B vitamins that many popular plant-based protein sources lack.
Let’s look at five reasons why cricket protein is the superior choice for athletes who are serious about high quality nutrition.
Clean source of highly bioavailable nutrients
Most fitness snacks are filled with unwanted substances like preservatives, sweeteners, and artificial flavors. SENS bars are the opposite; they are all natural. They are gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, grain-free, without added sugar or chemicals, and paleo-friendly! Actually, insects are probably the closest food to what our Paleolithic ancestors really ate.
High quality protein always handy
Snacks made from natural ingredients are not a new thing, but they lack protein, and even what protein is present doesn’t have a desirable amino acid profile. That’s where crickets shine! SENS Foods offers the only cricket based, pure ingredients, protein bar that has 20g of complete protein in just 65g.
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Amazingly sustainable
To produce the same amount of protein, crickets require 12x less feed than cattle and half as much as pigs or chickens, not to mention they can be fed food-waste, banana peels and so on, which would otherwise be thrown away. Their water and farm land demands are also vastly different; they only need 15l of water and 15m2 of land compared to the 30 000l and 250m2 that cattle require. Their farming also creates significantly less waste, pollution, and greenhouse gasses.
Much needed variety
Having only one or two types of protein in a diet can lead to amino acid imbalances over the long term. Variety is what helps fill the gaps. If you are relying on meat and eggs as the main protein sources in your meals, you might want to find an alternative for your snacks and post-workout nutrition. Cricket protein is the clear favorite here; there simply aren’t many others of a similar quality that can be carried around in a ready-to-eat package.
It’s all about the taste
Even though it seems like a new thing to us, eating insects is anything but new. As a species, we have been eating insects since forever, and about 80% of the world eats them regularly even today. For a lot of people the idea of eating a bug doesn’t feel right, but funnily enough, taste might be one of the biggest advantages of insects. Cricket flour is relatively easy to disguise compared to whey or soy powders, so the bars made from it don’t need to be ruined by added sugar or artificial flavorings. Actually, they don’t need that much sugar at all to taste great, so even those living the low-carb life can enjoy them without any guilt.
It is almost ironic that insects, the best specialists in the animal kingdom, are such a great food choice for CrossFitters, the best generalists in sports today.
