Outdoor Food and Sports Supplement Discovery Tool

Who is this tool for? In our opinion, literally everyone could benefit from it and here is how.

It doesn't matter if you're doing a multi-day ultra marathon across a mountainous terrain or you're on a low carb diet and want to see what energy bars and ingredients work for you,

Or you're a parent that is looking for healthier snack food for their child, this tool can help!

 

New Features

This is not a normal website, this is a collaborative web app and with the feedback we get from you, we create new features and add them to this discovery tool every month! 

 

How To Use The Discovery Tool

There are three areas to the discovery tool,

1. when registered you get to save and compare individual items against each other.
2. The filtering options so that you can narrow down the foods you want to see.
3. The sorting options which lets you sort all the nutritional columns to see the most or least of a specific thing, from protein, through to sugars and beyond.

You can select filters and sort the table to find the best sports supplements or outdoor foods for your needs.

If you're an endurance athlete, we've written this comprehensive guide on how much, when to eat and how to use this tool to help you.

Filter The Discovery Tool

Filter food discovery tool in a number of ways.

Diet

You can filter the entire database by diet types, if you're vegan, select that diet and click apply, you will be shown all foods in this diet.

Food Type

If you're looking for a specific food type, such as a protein bar, packaged camping meal, hydration powder, drink, you can use this filter to select one or many food types.

Meal Time

All of the food items are split up in to their different meal times, when you would usually eat and consume them. If you're looking for a snack or suggestions for a breakfast, select and click apply.

Sugar Type

Interested in finding a food item with or without a specific sugar type, use this filter to do just that. There is an operator so you can select to filter to show or not show specific sugars in sports supplements.

Ingredients

We have categorised all food items by the types of ingredients used to create them. Ranging from fully processed to fully whole foods, just select what ingredients you want in your foods and click apply.

Brand

You can search through the entire database of outdoor foods and sports supplements by the manufacturer and brand that has made the food. With this filter you can compare entire brands foods against each other, which is not possible anywhere else.

Flavors

Prefer some flavors over others? If you love raspberry or chocolate, you can find foods based on these exact flavors. We currently have hundreds of flavors to choose from and will add more as new foods get added to the database.

Protein Type

If you like to choose your food based on the protein type, you can do that by going through the choices, selecting and clicking apply.

Food Prep

All foods require different types of preparation, some you can just open up and consume, whilst others need water adding and others need heating up. There are different approaches to making them ready and with this tool you can find foods based on how they need preparing.

An example would be to search for energy gels and select none needed as the food prep filter and it means that all energy gels don't need anything to make them ready. You'll find that some energy gels require water to wash them down so using the different filters together can really help you find better answers.

Needs Cooking

This is based more on packaged meals for camping as some foods don't and some do, this will help you narrow down your results to find camping no cook foods.

Consume Speed

Is a filter which will show you foods based on how fast you can consume them.

• Super Fast (on the go) - For foods such as energy gels and energy powders which you can consume within seconds
• Medium (on the go) - For foods that you can consume whilst you are moving, like energy bars
• Slow (stationary) - For foods that you need to consume whilst stationary, these foods often need preparing to make them ready to eat

If you want to see a complete list of foods which you can eat within seconds for an endurance event, just select super fast and see what options come up for you.

Packaging

A very important filter and feature to this tool, if you're looking for packaging which at the very least you can recycle, this filter with its options can help. If it's a specific material you are looking for or even to find eco packaging which is compostable, there are options for that.

Items Per Page

The tool shows just 50 items at a time, if you change this, you can see many more, up to 200 food items at any one time to compare against each other.

 

Sorting The Discovery Tool

Every food item has it's nutritional information added to the discovery tool and you can sort the entire table by the nutritional columns. Every per gram column has been calculated so that you can compare every food item fairly.

If you think about how current nutrition labels advertise the food items calories or protein, you get no scale or context as to whether that is a lot or not. You might have a protein bar say high protein energy bar, when in fact, the bar weighs more than other energy bars, so of course there will be more protein in it.

Calories Per Gram 

One for the ultralighters out there, filter the entire database of foods by those with the most calories per gram, or the least calories per gram. This metric means you can compare all foods evenly.

Calories per gram also means calorie density and how many calories you get for the weight of food you are carrying. If you are doing a thru-hike or an endurance event and are worried about how much weight you are carrying but want to have the most amount of calories on you possible, use this sorting option to help you find those foods that have the best calorie density.

Protein Per Gram

If you're interested in getting the most amount of protein you can from your outdoor and sports foods, then sort by this column. This will show you how much protein is in each gram of that food item. Here is an example, for every 1g of a food item, it could have 0.34g, this means that that food item is 34% protein. Others may have more or less and it's up to you to look at the table to compare them. If you register to the site, you can do just this and compare as many food items as you like by saving them to your saved list of food items and putting individual foods side-by-side.

Carbs Per Gram

If you're interested in seeing what foods have the least or most amount of carbs, this is the column for you. If you're in to low carb diets or ketogenic diet then you can use this column specifically to find outdoor and sports food with low carbs.

You can also go the other way if you're looking specifically for high carb density foods, such as energy gels, and see which offer the most carbs per gram so that when you're refuelling on an endurance event you know you're getting the most usable energy whilst on the go.

Fiber Per Gram

As above, this gives you an indication of the food items fiber density. If you're missing out on fiber and it's something you need to improve on and get more in your diet, look no further than simply clicking this column to order it by those with the most. 

You can also do the same the other way and sort it to show foods with the least amount of fiber.

Fats Per Gram

Although we don't show what fats are in certain foods, this is an indicator of how much fat is in each food item. Like the rest, the fats per gram column will show you how much fat content is in a gram of this food item.

This can be sorted like the other columns so you can see those with the most fats or the least dense fatty foods.

Sugar Per Gram

Looking in to the sugar produced and used in the food items? There may be a lot in some and none in others but combining this columns info with the sugar filter above the discovery tool hopefully you can find what you're after.

Some food items may have naturally occuring sugars and no sugars added, such as fruit. Remember to look in to their sugar type and you after you have filtered, you can then use this column more effectively to find foods you are interested in.

One example is that you do want sugar from fruit but not that much, so you can filter the discovery table by fruits or completely wholefoods ingredients or even a specific sugar type and then sort to your hearts content.

Sodium Per Gram

If you require high sodium amounts of electrolytes for endurance events or even none at all, use this column to sort the sodium content in each food item.

Because we use the per gram info, you can compare each food item equally as you're not comparing the serving size of sodium but how much sodium there is per gram, which puts all the numbers in this column in the same bracket to be compared.

Minutes of Energy

This column gives you a rough estimate of how many minutes of medium to hard exercise this food item and it's serving size can sustain you for.

We use the rule of thumb of 1.2g of carbohydrates equals 1 minute of energy usage. 

This comes from many studies and advice from many nutritionists and sports coaches where they recommend this as a guideline. This only goes for those who are using the food item during extended periods of exertion and for more than 1 hours worth of sustained exercise.

We write in much more detail here about how much you should consume when doing endurance events such as ultra marathons, cycle sportives, thru hikes, etc.

 

Disclaimer

We do our absolute best to make sure every piece of info and number is 100% correct, but sometimes we do make mistakes, even after triple checking the food items.

Before purchasing a food item on another website, please make sure to check the specific requirements you are after are correct.