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3 Green Energy Bars You Can Feel Good About

by JonnieMckinney Posted on May 2, 2016

Lets be honestnot all of us love spending hours in the kitchen on a beautiful Sunday, preparing tasty treats to enjoy throughout the week. While you may have pinned countless tasty-looking energy bar recipes on Pinterest, your baking sheet has yet to peek its head out fromthe depths of your cupboard. But, you want to keep your environmental footprint light, even though you simply do not have the time to whip up Instagram-worthy homemade energy bars every week.

What do you do? Luckily, there are a handful of companies that exclusively use quality, real ingredients while upping the sustainability game. Check out these three good-natured energy bar brands:

ReGrained: Innovative, nutritious and sustainable, ReGrained is making food out of what is often disposed aswaste. Specifically, they harness waste from the beer brewing process in the way of spent grain. In reality, the grain is anything but spent. ReGrained recovers the high quality spent grain from local craft breweries and puts it in their energy bars. Itis still highly nutritious, beinghigh in protein (comparable withalmonds), high infiber (with three times more than oats) and low on the glycemic index.

When you think about it, spent grain seems like the perfect ingredient for an energy bar. ReGrained bars, filledwith spent grain, honey, almond, egg whites and flax, are anutritionally and sustainably unique addition tothe energy bar market.

Exo: If you haven’t heard about cricket protein bars, it’s time to hop on the wagon. Crickets are a powerhouse of nutrition and sustainability.According to Exo, cricket flour has two times more protein content than beef, 2.2 times more iron than spinach and produces 100 times less greenhouse gases than cows. Crickets also take only one gallon of water to produce one pound of crickets, while cows require almost 2,000 gallons to produce one pound of beef.

Exo’sbars are soy, dairy, grain and gluten-free. They area friend to both Paleo eaters as well as the environment. Each bar contains around 40 crickets. Dont worry, you cant taste or see them, the crickets are ground up into a nutty roasted flour. Satisfyingand slightly sweet, Exo bars are making crickets look and taste great.

Kits Organic (CLIF Bar): CLIF, as a company, has been on the block for a while, but you cant deny their continuingefforts in sustainability. Over the years, CLIF has reduced their packaging by 10 percent, switched to operate their trucks on biodiesel, set the barto get 50 of their supply chain facilities operating on 50 percent green energy by 2020, and are on the fast track to go completely Zero Waste at their headquarters and supply chain facilities. Even though their brand is already highly successful,CLIFis relentlesslyfocused on recycling and developing more ways totransition over to renewable energy.

The great thing about theirKits Organic barsis that they aremade entirely with whole, organic foods (like dates, walnuts, unsweetened chocolate, almonds, sea salt and vanilla beans in the Dark Chocolate+Walnut bar). Plus, its nice to see a snack at a gas station rest area that you’ll actually feel good about putting into your mouth.

While making your own bars athome can be fun and may be the most environmentally-friendly option, these three energy bar companies are really upping the ante when it comes to store-bought energy bars. Give them a try if you’re on the run, and feel good about supporting brands that have you and the planet’s best interests in mind.

Related:

What Happens When You Stop Exercising
5 Healthier Ways to Deal with Stress and Anxiety
9 Cool Apps for the Environmentally Conscious

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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3 Green Energy Bars You Can Feel Good About

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Sanders Wants to Make It Cheaper for Families to Visit Inmates

by MaurineGooding Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Americans with a family member behind bars have to pay for a lot more than just a lawyer. Although the FCC recently capped the cost of interstate phone calls from correctional facilities at 21 cents a minute, in-state calls, which are not regulated, can cost five times more than that. And as I explained in a piece for the magazine in February, it can cost as much as a dollar a minute for a 20-minute video visit with an inmate at county jails. (By comparison, the in-person visits that video visitation software has replaced are free.)

Now, Bernie Sanders wants to change that. On Thursday, the independent senator from Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill (co-sponsored by three progressive congressmen) designed to crack down on private contractors in public prisons. The bill’s biggest-ticket item is a prohibition on federal funding for private prisons altogether. (Currently about 1.6 million federal inmates nationally are at private facilities.)

But the bill—read it here—also takes on video and phone contractors. Specifically, it would put an unspecified cap on the per-minute cost of video and phone conferencing with inmates; it would prohibit or restrict correctional facilities from taking a cut of the revenue from phone and video conferencing fees (which can create an incentive to jack up rates, and cut back on things like in-person visitation); and it would require corrections departments to open up their facilities to multiple phone and video contractors, giving inmates and their families choices over which providers to use.

Sanders has already nudged the Democratic field to the left on economic issues like a $15 minimum wage. Maybe prison justice is next.

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Sanders Wants to Make It Cheaper for Families to Visit Inmates

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This GOP Congressman’s Solution to Homelessness Involves Getting Eaten By Wolves

by CarolNXGmes Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Homelessness is a very serious problem. Nearly 600,000 Americans don’t have a home, including one in every 30 children. Recently, we’ve reported on some innovative solutions, including tiny houses and free, no-strings-attached apartments.

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) has a different idea. It involves wolves. Specifically, releasing grey wolves into the districts of 79 of his peers in Congress who had recently called for greater protections for the endangered species.

From the Washington Post:

“How many of you have got wolves in your district?” he asked. “None. None. Not one.”

“They haven’t got a damn wolf in their whole district,” Young continued. “I’d like to introduce them in your district. If I introduced them in your district, you wouldn’t have a homeless problem anymore.”

Wow.

If you’re unfamiliar with Don Young, he is renowned for his outlandish antics, mostly about animals, like that time he brandished an 18-inch walrus penis bone on the House floor or the time he called climate change the “biggest scam since Teapot Dome” (a major bribery scandal in the 1920s involving the Harding administration).

A Young spokesperson told the Post that the comment was “purposely hyperbolic.”

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This GOP Congressman’s Solution to Homelessness Involves Getting Eaten By Wolves

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How Much Would You Pay For $4,905 In Pension Benefits?

by JanetTTWWo Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Adam Ozimek points us to some recent research suggesting that people don’t actually value pensions very highly:

The study utilizes a change in policy in Illinois that allowed teachers to purchase more pension benefits in exchange for a one-time fee. This allowed the determination of how much teachers are willing to pay for marginal pension benefits. The authors found that on average, teachers valued each $1 in marginal pension benefits at $0.20.

This is useful information for two reasons. First, it suggests states may be able to save money and make teachers better off by buying back pension obligations in exchange for current lump sum payments. Second, it suggests that for districts looking to cut costs, decreases in benefits do not need to be offset with equal dollar value increases in current pay in order to maintain labor supply.

(Yes, that’s 20 cents for one dollar of present value. Specifically, the study finds that on average, teachers are willing to pay only $1,000 for benefits that the pension fund has to pay $4,905 to purchase.)

But does this mean that Illinois teachers would snap up a $1,000 lump sum today in return for a decrease of $4,905 in future pension benefits? Not so fast, pardner. A combination of status quo bias, loss aversion, and the endowment effect suggests that things wouldn’t be so easy.

Status quo bias is just what it sounds like: we all tend to succumb to a sort of emotional inertia that favors whatever benefits we happen to be getting at the moment. Loss aversion is the well known effect that people work harder to avoid the loss of $X than to secure the gain of $X. And the endowment effect causes people to ascribe greater value than normal to things they own, solely because they happen to own them. Put all these things together, and it’s highly unlikely that Illinois teachers would be willing to sell off a dollar of benefits they currently get in return for 20 cents today. In fact, it’s quite possible they’d only sell it off for more than a dollar.

Of course, this applies only to workers who are already vested in a pension system. For brand new workers, given a choice of salary today vs. pension tomorrow, it’s quite possible they’d undervalue the pension. In fact, I’d say it’s almost inevitable, since most of us do exactly that. Nonetheless, I’m skeptical that this research tells us much about either the size of this effect or whether it would be good public policy to even offer the option. The circumstances are just too different.

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How Much Would You Pay For $4,905 In Pension Benefits?

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Study: Fad Diets Work (But Not Why You Think)

by Polly Browder Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

What’s the best diet to follow to get healthy—should you go Paleo, low glycemic, low-carb, Mediterranean, or low-fat? For a paper released last month in the Annual Review of Public Health, Yale medical researchers David Katz and Samuel Meller surveyed the scientific evidence and decided … all of the above. Specifically, they found that all of these fad diets can be consistent with these basic principles:

The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches. Emphasis added.

But what about the Paleo diet, which encourages meat eating? The authors conclude the “aggregation of evidence” supports meat eating, as long as the “animal foods are themselves the products, directly or ultimately, of pure plant foods—the composition of animal flesh and milk is as much influenced by diet as we are.” That’s entirely consistent with the Paleo push for meat from pasture-raised animals, and brought to mind a study I wrote about late last year finding that cows fed on grass deliver milk with healthier fat profile than their industrially raised peers.

The Yale paper essentially cuts through the hype of various fad diets and affirms the koan-like advice put forward by author Michael Pollan in his 2008 book In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In fact, the authors reference Pollan directly in the chart that summarizes their findings:

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Study: Fad Diets Work (But Not Why You Think)

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