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I Ate 5 Different Ration Bars for a Week - My Recommendations
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May 21, 2024
Emergency Ration Bars seem like a really good idea... and they certainly have their place. But ration bars are not all created equal. In this video, I break down the differences between 5 different emergency ration bars and share my recommendation. Ration Bars from this Video (with the prices I paid for them, current prices may vary) SOS Food Lab - https://amzn.to/3P2GXU7 UST - https://amzn.to/45WONWv BDH High Energy Bar - https://amzn.to/3EkH4p8 Datrex DX2400F - https://amzn.to/45Yeo1f Ready Hour - https://readyhour.com/products/ready-hour-emergency-ration-bars-2400-calories Pantry Preparedness is a trademark of Income School LLC, an Idaho Limited Liability Company
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0:00
Welcome to Pantu Preparedness, my friends
0:01
My name is Rick, and in a recent video, I shared with you what happened when I ate only
0:08
emergency ration bars for an entire week. I'm going to link to that here in case you haven't had a chance to see that
0:14
However, during that experiment, I actually tested out five different emergency ration bars
0:20
and today I want to go ahead and break down each of those bars and do a comparison for you
0:26
so you know if you're going to get some, which ones you might want to get
0:29
So I want to start out, I'm going to kind of do these in the order that I ate them
0:36
I have a ton of notes from while I was doing the challenge and if needed, I'll sacrifice
0:42
and take a nibble again if necessary. All right, I'm going to start out with this one
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This is the SOS Food Lab Emergency Ration Bar. This is probably the most common one that I see
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If you just search like Emergency Ration Bar on the internet, this is what you're going to find
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more often than not. This emergency ration bar, like I said, is really, really common
1:04
It's not very expensive. But let's talk a little bit about what goes into this thing
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So there's nine servings of these within a container. Each serving has 410 calories
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If you were to eat all nine within a day, you'd get 3,600 calories in a day
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So that's probably more than a lot of us are gonna eat during an emergency kind of survival situation
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When I was eating this emergency ration bar, I ate 44%. of what the, you know, of the package, right? And so I ate 1,640 calories. Why didn't I eat more
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It's mostly because they're just not very satisfying. And so unless you're feeling a lot of
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hunger pains or you're really low energy, you're not really going to want to eat as much as you
1:47
maybe should eat. So let me talk to you a little bit about this one and the flavor. I got the
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I can't even see it written on here anyway, anywhere, but the ones I ordered were the cinnamon
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and coconut flavor. Um, And I noticed that the taste was more like kind of that brown sugar molasses flavor
2:06
It wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible either. The texture of these is a bit grainy
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If you can't handle kind of eating something that's kind of grainy, it feels like there's some grit in there
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You're probably also going to have a hard time stomaching it. The first day I ate these, I was fine with them
2:24
The energy level that I had was fine. Let's talk a little bit about the nutrition breakdown
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down. Each package of these has 18 grams of fat, but 53 grams of carbs and only six grams of protein
2:35
So it's going to give you a fair amount of energy in the form of carbs, quick energy, which again
2:41
in emergency survival situation, that is probably just fine. But it's a bit light on the protein
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If I managed to eat all nine of these bars, I'd get 54 grams of protein in a day
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which isn't as much as like a man my size should have, but also
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given that I was able to eat less than half of what was in this package in a day
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it means I was getting, I got like 20 grams of protein that day. So not fantastic from that standpoint
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I didn't feel a ton of hunger, but again, I ate these on my first day
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I also ate them again on the fourth day of my week-long challenge
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And this time I did feel hunger off and on throughout the day. But honestly, at this point, I was kind of on a semi-starvation diet because I was only able
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to eat so much ration bar in general. So my takeaway on the SOS emergency ration bar, it's fine
3:34
It'll do the job. It'll sustain you, but it's not going to be very good. And by about the
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second day of eating these things, you're probably going to be really sick of them. That molassesy
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flavor and that grainy texture just didn't sit very well with me. And by the time I was eating
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these the second time around, I was crushing them up and mixing them with hot water to try to somewhat
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them. They don't actually dissolve that well. So you end up eating this kind of suspension
4:01
of grainy ration bar broken in little pieces in hot water. But that's a great way to get these
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down, by the way, if that's kind of where you're at. And that's what you have to live on
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All right. The next day of my challenge, I went ahead and I broke out this one. This is the
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U.S.T. Emergency Food ration bars. I was like, I went with the apple cinnamon. I was like
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that sounds pretty good. Apple cinnamon. If you can see here, I'll try to block that so it'll
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focus in on here. It's got kind of a little groove here and here. When it was full, it was
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there were six of those kind of blocks. So it came in one big block and you're supposed to kind
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of break it into individual servings. It didn't break on those blocks very well. Even with the
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big knife, it just kind of broke where it broke and you can see that's what I have left. That's
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what I have left because once again I was not able to eat all of the food in the package If I had eaten it all I would have had 2 calories in the day That a pretty good amount I think especially for an emergency situation
5:02
For a lot of people, that's going to be plenty of calories no matter what. For again, a man my size, that's light on the daily calories
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That's a calorie intake where I would lose weight. But it's kind of a moot point that it came with 2,400 calories worth of food because I was only able to eat 60% of it
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before I was done. So I actually only ate 1,440 calories of this one. I have to tell you
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not trying to dogg on UST. The only flavor I tried was the apple cinnamon. However, this one from
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the very first bite, I didn't really like it. The flavor isn't too bad, but it kind of had this
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lingering taste that stuck around for a really long time. That the more I ate, even as I just
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kind of nibbled on it slowly, like I would take one little section and spend an hour
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eating it slowly over time because I couldn't stand to have too much of it in my mouth at once
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It's kind of sad that that's the way that it was. This I ate again. It was on day two
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So I was feeling a fair amount of hunger throughout the day. But even though I was feeling hungry, I was unable to get myself to continue eating
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This one, in order for me to have any dinner at all, I literally had to crush it up and put it into a cup of super hot water
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and even then I spent about an hour and a half slowly sipping that one serving down
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I honestly, everyone's taste is a little bit different, but if you're like me, I would not recommend
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the UST bar. Let's talk a little bit though about some other things. Let's talk about the texture
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This one is a lot like the SOS bar in terms of texture. It's kind of got that grainy feel
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kind of a little bit of that kind of molassesy kind of feel as well as flavor too
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And if we talk here about nutrition, it's got, let's see, per serving
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six servings this container, 19 grams of fat, 51 grams of carbs, and seven grams of protein
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So a pretty similar breakdown to what we get in the SOS Food Labs bars
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Decent amount of fat, lots and lots of carbs for energy. Again, I get it that makes sense for an energy kind of ration bar, but very, very low on protein
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It's not going to stick around and be super satisfying for a long time. and if you were to have to survive on these for any sort of extended period of time
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prepare to lose muscle mass. That's coming. All right. Next we got to get into this one. This is the BDH high energy bar. You can find
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these on Amazon. This one is the only one I was able to eat the whole box. So I don't
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actually have a bar here to show you. It looks a lot like this one. This is a different one
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I'll show you in just a minute. But it's not quite the same texture. It's kind of like
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texture-wise in between this and this. Let's see what I wrote down about it
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Okay, it's basically exactly what I remember. It has a much more plain flavor
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The texture to it is also less, you don't really get the graininess you get with these
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but it's a little bit more like a wheat cracker, like a saltine cracker, but without the salt
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So kind of a plain flavor. Now you would think if it was a lot like a saltine cracker
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that it would make you super thirsty to eat very much of this. it actually wasn't too bad
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In fact, with all of these, I didn't feel like I had to have a lot of water
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to be able to get these down. I could actually eat through it and it didn't dry out my mouth a ton
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That said, having water to wash it down does make eating these easier
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It's just not necessary from like a dryness standpoint. We haven't talked yet at all about packaging
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This one does come in a vacuum sealed package just like these. The box was on the inside of that package
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This one was easier to open than either of the first two
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This one you can see, this is the SOS. It doesn't really have like any sort of tab here to get it started
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Maybe over here. So you kind of have to cut it and get it started and then you can tear it open
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This one here did have a little tab to get it started
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but it like wouldn't follow the same line. It was a little bit of a pain to open as well
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This one though was the easiest to open. You can see here how I opened it
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Just tear it easily with my hands because it had that little. little starting tab. Now I mentioned this one had the least calories. This one actually only has
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four bars in it at all that are all kind of about this size, maybe slightly bigger. And
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each bar had fewer than 300 calories. The whole package here contains 1,145 calories. Again
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for a man of my size, that's like half as much as I should have as kind of like my baseline
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But I only ate the one box in that day. So, that's all the calories I got in that day. The
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breakdown here of those calories is 18 grams of fat per per serving the
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servings are it kind of weird there are hundred grams servings there 250 grams here so a serving is two right So what 40 of the package but it comes in four bars So a serving isn a bar It not even two bars It kind of a
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weird fraction of bars. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So anyway, that's the way that it
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breaks down, though, is for every 458 calories, there's 18 grams of fat, 61
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grams of carbs, but 12 and a half grams of protein. So, um, again, kind of similar
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fractionally kind of a similar breakdown as the SOS and the UST bars that we've already talked
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about. All right. Now we got to move on here to the day trex or datrix. I don't know how
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they pronounce it here, but this packaging here, this one here, out of everything that I've
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shown you so far, when I ate this, this was the favorite. The reason why, the flavor was
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incredibly plain. They didn't try to do any sort of weird sweetening that left weird lingering
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taste in my mouth. So it was actually kind of refreshing to have something like this
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after days of trying to eat this other stuff that I just could not stomach. I didn't have any
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trouble with the flavor at all. Again, it was a lot kind of like a, I think like a saltine cracker
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again, but without any salt on it. So an unsalted saltine cracker. The texture isn't quite like
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a saltine cracker, it's maybe a little bit more like a plain gram cracker or something
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like the original gram crackers. My kids called these cardboard, because that's kind of what they
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looked like. You can see how like kind of crumbly this is. When I break it apart, it's kind of
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like food particle board. And that's kind of what it looks like. When you look at it, it looks a lot
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like particle board. Hopefully you can see that pretty well. Just kind of with all these pieces
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sort of mash together and then vacuum sealed in this thin packaging. Opening this packaging
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was really easy. It had a pull tab right in the middle where I could just easily tear this open
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Now it doesn't reseal so that makes it so I can't just like zip it back up. In fact, none
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of these so far, none of them at all, had that sort of packaging. The only one that I could
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actually close back up was this because it had a box on the inside. But this one had the least
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number of bars and I certainly was going to eat all those within a day. This entire package
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contained 2,400 calories. So I think that's probably a decent amount for an emergency ration
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type situation. Have one sort of contained package contain about that many calories
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That said on their instructions, they say to eat one bar every six hours per person
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So that means that during the day I'm only eating like three bars. That's like 600 calories
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per day per person. It's not really very much. So I guess they're just trying to prevent you from starving to death
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And if that's the case, if I'm only eating like three a day, this whole package is actually supposed to last me like four days
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When I ate these, I ended up eating a little over or a little under half the package
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I ate a thousand calories by this point. That's not that many calories
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But like I said, this has been my favorite so far between both the flavor and the texture
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I think just at this point, I was kind of in starvation mode and I was tired of eating things that were not food
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A couple of the things of note. I did say that this one's kind of crumbly. It actually like when you go to open it, it's going to start to fall apart. It doesn't actually hold together that well. Make sure you open it over like a bowl or something so that you can catch all of it. So you can actually eat the sawdust that it gives you. Again, best flavor so far, best texture so far as well. It also of everything here is the one that made my mouth the driest so far. So also, also
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So make sure that you have water on hand. Again, you can eat it without. It's not like eating saltine crackers
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but it is going to dry out your mouth more than the others. The fifth one I want to share with you today is this one
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This is the ready hour. It looks exactly like the Dattrex one, or the Daitrex
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or however they choose to say that. This one is one I bought from my Patriot Supply
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I ordered some other stuff, and they like tacked this on. They said, hey, if you want some of this too, we'll give you a discount on it
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And that's kind of what set off this. whole test here. I was like, yeah, let me try those ration bars. Let's see how they are
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This one is incredibly similar to the DATREX. Um, 2,400 calories in a package. This one tells
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you to unwrap and eat one bar every few hours. So, they're actually recommending that
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you eat about twice as many as the DATRx one, which would be more like 1,200 calories a
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day. If you ate one about every three hours, minus while you should be asleep. Talking
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about texture and flavor, it's very, very similar to the DATRx. At first, when I saw it, I was
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like did they just take these DATREX bars and just put them in a different package I mean it even the packaging is so similar It got the same little tab right in the center
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You pull it right open. It opens very easily, but it came vacuum sealed in this Mylar bag
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Anyway, I just was like, did they just repackage these? The flavor was almost the same
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The texture was like exactly the same as the Dattrex, but the flavor was slightly different
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And honestly, I didn't like it quite as much. Still my second favorite on the table, but it wasn't quite as good
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That said, when I looked at the packaging, and I actually looked at the breakdown here
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they both have in one serving with 200 calories, one bar, they both have nine grams of fat
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They both have 26 grams of carbs. Not looking good. They're looking exactly the same
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This one has two and a half grams of protein. This one has seven
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So if I were to eat the 2,400 calories of this, that would be 12 servings of this
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I would get 84 grams of protein. Compare that with the SOS bars where if I were to eat the same number of calories
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2400 calories worth of this, I would only get 36 grams of protein
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So when it came to the total amount of the protein density of the ration bar
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this one has substantially more. It has the most on the table
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And so honestly, if I were to buy more of these, which I don't know how much I'm going to lean on emergency ration bars for my emergency food supply, maybe some, but probably not as much as I thought until I did this experiment
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Again, more on that in that other video. You should go check it out if you're at all interested
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That said, if I'm going to buy more emergency rations, it's probably going to be these ones
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They were the easiest to eat. The flavor was the plainest. basically a lot like the Dattrex
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The texture was perfectly palatable. In fact, they say right on the packaging here
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designed for maximum palidability across all ages and food tastes. That's how I knew I was really in for it when I saw that
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Maximum palatibility. That's how we describe our food product. But no, emergency ration bars are
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they're just not great to eat. They're not really intended to be
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They're intended to keep us alive and prevent major malnutrition. usually during emergency situations
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And I do think that these serve a really good purpose. If a lot of people were suddenly displaced
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because of a natural disaster or something or war or whatever it is
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and they needed to get moving, this is a product that we could like provide in mass
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to a lot of people and prevent them from starving until they can get to somewhere where they can get actual food
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The thing we haven't talked about here is how much all of these costs
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Pricing for these kinds of things. things just shifts all the time. So I can share what I paid for them. In fact, I will share what I
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paid for each of these. I'll put it in the description for this video. And I'll link to all of them
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So you can go find them very, very easily and see how much they cost right now. I don't know
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Maybe you like granier texture and things that taste more like kind of that molasses flavor
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If that's the case, I would probably go with these SOS bars. They were very inexpensive
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And I mean, again, one package of these is 3,600 calories. That might be enough for three people for a whole day or one person for three if you're going to go and eat about as much as I did
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So this could be a really good, just fiscally responsible way to do emergency ration bars
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Again, I just would not lean on using emergency ration bars as your main source of food for an extended period of time
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And by that, I mean more than like a day or two. If you like that, I would appreciate it if you would let me know
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Also, let me know what other questions you have. Anything I didn't cover in this video, I ate a full days worth of all five of these different
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and a couple of them I ate on two different days because I really tested them out for an entire week
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I'd be happy to share with you any other information that I have about these as well as more
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about my experience. Also, let me know what questions you have about preparedness in general
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This channel is all about being prepared for whatever life throws at you
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And that means having skills, having knowledge, having the right supplies. I am perfectly happy to do the testing for you
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so you don't have to go buy a ton of products you're not going to use. And I can let you know, based upon my testing
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what my recommendations would be. Just let me know what you'd like me to test, and I'll make it happen for you
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Thank you for watching the video. If you're still here at this point, especially thank you very much
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and I hope to see you in the next video