The Best Hill Snacks - Top Trumps

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To get performance out of your body, you have to put fuel in. But on a big hill day not all foods are equal. You want grub that's easily carried, easy to eat, and with a good nutritional balance to keep the muscles pumping. Your choice of hill food should also be tasty, says Fliss Freeborn, because you need to want to eat it. Here are her least worst hill snacks - Top Trumps Edition.

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4
 Harry Jarvis 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I find it hard to believe that pork pies didn't make it onto your list. They have for many years my preferred option. One significant advantage they have over sandwiches is that they don't fall apart. 

And Mars Bars. 

 Doug 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

No saucisson or chorizo ?

 freeheel47 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I am outraged at the disrespect to lichen.

1
 Jon Greengrass 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Fab article, informative, educational and funny.  I'm definitely going to try cornettos next winter when I'm out in the snowy hills with my kids, I took chocolate + dates this year, frozen dates were nice but the frozen dark chocolate was horrible, like eating sand.

 Denning76 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I see a disturbing lack of Scotch Eggs and Tunnock's Bars.

 Andy Hardy 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

"Nature Valley" bars - taste how I imagine a carpet tile dipped in syrup would taste - bleurgh

2
 Maggot 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

No having to turn your rucsac inside out to lick up all your banana pulp and suck your gear that has soaked up any juices, for maximum energy input?

 PaulJepson 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Peanut butter sandwich. Unbeatable. 

5
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I read the whole article and there isn't one mention of increased farting power !

Bad title .

 TMM 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Buttered malt loaf. Job jobbed.

Carbs, sugary fruit topped off with salty, fatty butter. Boxes ticked. It never looks great so having it squidged up is no hardship.

1
 Flinticus 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

One of my 'go to' foods is Soreen loaf. You can sit on it and it is still edible. You could probably use as a field dressing to plug a wound. Lots of calories and protein. 

1
 Graeme G 24 Jun 2021
In reply to PaulJepson:

> Peanut butter sandwich. Unbeatable. 

PBJ surely aces it?

And what about consideration by season? I’ve always enjoyed a post-Xmas sandwich with Roast Goose. Pure indulgence.

 mobeirn 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Christmas cake. If you make it with enough booze in it, it will last well over a year (and keep tasting better and better...)

 Basemetal 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I'm still a bit traumatised by discovering Tablet bars can go off.... it never occurred to me, and to be fair they don't usually get to live long enough for it to be a problem. But that reassured feeling of knowing there was one somewhere in the bottom of my rucksack from a few trips ago was exploded when I went excavating for it in a Cairngorm blizzard and found a bar that could only be described as 'rancid'. Morale plummeted... 

 Sean Kelly 24 Jun 2021
In reply to Harry Jarvis:

> And Mars Bars. 

Yes, very tasty but they are desperate with false teeth on the Ben in winter!

 Sealwife 24 Jun 2021
In reply to Sean Kelly:

Slice into bite sized pieces and store in zip lock bag.

 robertwh 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Salted Peanuts and Dried Mixed Fruit (cake isle).  Cheap and great taste, fat, salt, sugar/carb balance.

Post edited at 17:22
 gooberman-hill 24 Jun 2021
In reply to Harry Jarvis:

My old mate Holly Rush (ultra-runner) swears by Pork Pies - she even got sponsored by a pork pie  company (Vale of Mowbray).

Now if only I could get fast, maybe I could be sponsored by St Austell Ales!

Steve

 Tony Buckley 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

The trick with sandwiches - well, wholemeal rolls for me - is to make them up with cheese and mango chutney but in one of them use lime pickle.  Make sure that you can't see what's in the rolls from outside.  Then wrap them in cling film and mix them up so you don't know which roll contains what.

Then come time to eat, it's like playing russian roulette with your taste buds.  The sense of your mouth being in harm's way can liven up a walk through the wettest, claggiest weather.

T.

 James Oswald 24 Jun 2021
In reply to Tony Buckley:

Good article, but It was in fact a fantastic Spanish tortilla

 girlymonkey 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I like oatcakes and houmous. I even have a Stockans oatcakes tin to stop them getting broken. Nutritious and tasty 😋

1
 GrahamD 24 Jun 2021
In reply to girlymonkey:

I rate granary loaf and humus.  Absolutely no prep required.  Just rip off a chunk of bread and dip away.

 Dave Garnett 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

For top trumps onion bhajis generally do the trick.

Post edited at 21:41
 Spanish Jack 24 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Boiled eggs and apples, best packaging and nutritional value.

In reply to Denning76:

> I see a disturbing lack of Scotch Eggs and Tunnock's Bars.

Too right!

😁

edit- and Bell’s chicken curry pies…

Post edited at 22:51
In reply to Flinticus:

Soreen isn't ready to eat until it's been matured in the bottom of a rucksack for at least half of a climbing season. If it's still square, or in date, it's not ready yet.

 Misha 25 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I’m preplexed that eating at the crag is a thing. Aren’t people too busy climbing?

9
 Flinticus 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Misha:

What else to do with your free hand while belaying?

 C Witter 25 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I see a lot of people, especially occasional hikers, treating a day out as an excuse to eat and drink all kinds of sugary junk. My dad's quite bad for it, actually: he said he'd sort the snacks for a hiking weekend once and came back with Coca Cola, Mars bars and Haribo. What a pile of vomitous junk! I think it was in part due to eating all this sugar that he ended up lost in an awful sugar low on the way down from the hill and I thought I might end up carrying him the last kilometer.

I think flapjack is the most technologically advanced food known to human kind (quite a bit of sugar, to be fair, but also protein, carbs and fat). Cold pizza is a classic; cooked and cooled cheese pasties are also pretty good. A new one, that I recommend, is quiche! Great cragging food.

2
 GrahamD 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Flinticus:

> What else to do with your free hand while belaying?

Mobile phone ?

 Basemetal 25 Jun 2021
In reply to C Witter:

Cycling websites have a lot of up to date info on nutrition for long runs and there might be quite a bit of useful carry over for some kinds of climbing and hillwalking. The thing that's surprised me most has been the de-demonisation of sugars, even table sucrose, as a carbohydrate for prolonged steady efforts like a 100 mile ride (or presumably a 12 hour munro round).

I'd previously formed the opinion that slower burn was always better and that eating protein and fats with some faster sugars was the better fuelling option for sustainable energy, but a lot of the cycling articles point to the limitations of fat and protein when they are being used for short to medium energy in that they slow digestion and require more blood supply to the gut to metabolise.

As I understand it, the cyclists' recommendation is that continuous activity needs carbohydrate and that simple carbs are best for high output activity.  Fats and proteins eaten would then be broken down to get energy from them rather than used for muscle repair (which won't  happen until after the exercise session anyway, and that's not the timing of snacks but of your post exercise meal and subsequent recovery nutrition) Even sucrose, breaking down to fructose and glucose, two sugars with different GIs, will work just fine to fuel working muscles and you'll feel lighter and easier for it while you work. The mantra is 'carbs, carbs, carbs' for endurance efforts, with protein for repair and recovery, but not so much use during the effort. Fats slow down energy availability, and can render you a bit sluggish, though they can provide a reserve you'd use before your own body fat.

That said, I usually function in an environment of excess intake with more than enough carbs around even by default, but I've found it quite interesting on the bike to work at eating 70g of carbs an hour for long runs and seen positive effects. Front loading the day's eating with carbs pays dividends later when fatigue would really set in, as the digestive limit for metabolising carbs seems to be around 90g an hour (and our livers can only store about 120g of glycogen) and eventually we get into energy debt if we use more calories than that (i.e. 3-400 kCal an hour). Hitting the wall /knocking/ bonking/ are all the same 'glycogen tank empty' phenomena, and the best solution is carbs since that's what you've run out of.  If you're working at lower output fat-burning rates, you won't hit a wall, but you won't have the sprint energy available. The transition from glycogen burning to fat burning is the queasy wobbly 'going to die' bit of a time trial- it passes, but the ideal is to postpone it by topping up carbs for as long as possible. On the hill it seems much less natural to graze away early in the day but that would pay off on a Cuillin traverse . For gentler days maybe the effort profile/energy demand is low enough to allow fat burning metabolism energy rates to cope more comfortably, especially if you're trained to it.

Either way, once away from the context of a sedentary life, there s a place for sugar.  Additive junk should probably still retain its  health warning but the odd day shouldn't hurt .

 C Witter 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Basemetal:

I think there's a place for sugar, too. For a start, when my dad was collapsing into a sugar low, half a can of coke sorted him out and got him the rest of the way to the car and, eventually, the pub! But, as you yourself suggest, I'm quite suspicious of extrapolating directly from a high aerobic sport like cycling to hiking or climbing. Personally, I trust my gut instinct that real food is going to do you better than haribo and mars bar rubbish and I suspect that salt, fat and protein will do you better than refined sugar when you're out trudging up big hills on a cold winter day or engaged in a long summer day of climbing. I don't have anything to back it up, but even eating a lot of sugar starts to feel disgusting after a while and I feel like that's my body asking for something different.

 Basemetal 25 Jun 2021
In reply to C Witter:

We're coming from the same place I think. What's shifting for me is exploring the thinking that carbs don't need to be (or benefit from being) 'balanced' by protein and fat for nutrition during a day's prolonged activity. Not as a longer term diet, but during the active part of a day.

The quality of the carbohydrate (meaning purity I suppose) matters, so junk is still junk, but bananas, dates, sultanas, rice cakes, cold toast, jam, honey, home baking or even "sports nutrition" can deliver glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, lactose  and their like that will convert to glycogen with minimum fuss. 

Taste, and even the feeling of eating, seem to be dominated by what you need at the time, and I take your point that too much sugar can be disgusting. Variety helps, but at the end of the day I'll choose comfort food as often as functional food. I've realised  that I don't really like to eat the same food on a big hill day, or on the bike, as at home and I'm beginning to suspect that the cycling nutrition info is partly explaining this for me. If I think about a cheese or salami roll while slogging up a 40 degree slope my gut tells me it wants the bare roll. At home my diet is fairly high in proteins and fats.

Again, YMMV, and the fascinating thing is that experimenting with diet (given that luxury of choice) can make real differences to how you feel and what you can take on. The bike seems to be a bit of a laboratory for amplifying the effects of nutrition choices.

 Sean_J 25 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Anderl Heckmair et al would probably recommend liquid amphetamine as *the* top hill snack of choice. Small and light, and quite moreish I suspect!

 Dave Garnett 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Misha:

> I’m preplexed that eating at the crag is a thing. Aren’t people too busy climbing?

I used to be.  When I was (first) a student I'd go away for the weekend without giving food a thought and certainly climb all day without eating.  Now I find I need to pay a bit more attention to it. 

 yorkshire_lad2 25 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I like marzipan, terrible sugar hit, but indestructible.

Also, I hat gels, because I see so many discarded empty gel packets littering the place up.   Pack it in, pack it out!

 Toerag 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Spanish Jack:

> Boiled eggs and apples, best packaging and nutritional value.

Hardboiled just before going out = handwarmers

 Toerag 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Graeme G:

> PBJ surely aces it?

Nope, the jam splurges out and makes everything sticky. Peanut butter and nutella is where it's at - 'snickers' sandwich.

Also good is Philadelphia and jam. Sliced tomato, mayonnaise/Philadelphia and herbal salt is an excellent savoury sandwich.

In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Bombay mix for grazing on the move, Malt Loaf with butter and cheese for a lunch and a mini Pork Pie for morale!

 Justaname 25 Jun 2021
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Peanut butter and marmite sarnies are good for when you've had enough of PBJ.

Kendal Mint Cake company superfood bars are very 👍good, tasty and packed with carbs and nutrition 

Post edited at 20:47
 Misha 25 Jun 2021
In reply to Flinticus:

> What else to do with your free hand while belaying?

Take photos. 


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