Three Menus for Lunch

Before presenting the menus themselves, it’s important that we cover a few points about sports nutrition. In order to have a high energy level on the trail your calories must be properly balanced between fat, carbohydrate, and protein sources. You should get 30% of your calories from fat, 50–55% from carbohydrates, and 15–20% from protein. Fat provides 9 calories per gram, while carbohydrates and protein provide 4 calories per gram. The amount of carbohydrates stated on food labels includes fiber, and fiber has no calories. Therefore, before calculating carbohydrate calories, you must subtract the fiber content from the total carbohydrates. You should get at least 15 grams of fiber for every 1000 calories you eat.

In order to help plan meals, I designed an Excel spreadsheet that makes all the necessary caloric calculations for you. All you have to do is enter the amount of fat, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and sugar for each item you’re using. In addition to the nutritional information on food labels, there is a USDA online database that provides a wealth of nutritional information. I used this database to determine the nutritional values for these lunches.

In this article I propose three lunch menus intended to serve two people. These menus provide the optimum backpacker’s balance of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. The levels of these nutrients are fine-tuned with small amounts of protein powder and glucose polymer powder. Glucose polymer powder can be found in nutritional supplement stores. It’s water soluble complex carbs and different brands are made from such things as corn and yellow peas.

These lunches provide about 900 calories per person. If you’re like me, your breakfast is 500 calories and your dinner is 1200 calories. Assuming a goal of 3000 calories per day,* this leaves 400 calories to be made up as Cytomax sports drink powder and between-meal snacks.

Cytomax greatly reduces muscle soreness by neutralizing lactic acid buildup in your muscle tissue. It has other benefits too. Your body stores its carbohydrate reserves as a substance called glycogen. At the cellular level muscle contractions are driven by a substance called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Cytomax boosts muscular glycogen and ATP levels by 300%. Cytomax also reduces your body’s oxygen consumption by 11%, giving you more wind at high altitude.

Now let us move on to the menus.

*	This is the most I’m able to eat. However, some authorities recommend 4000 calories per day for backpackers.

The above meal has the optimum backpacker’s balance of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. It also has a good balance of complex to simple carbs, with only 43% of the net carbs being sugars. Complex carbs replenish muscular glycogen, while fructose preferentially loads glycogen into your liver. Therefore, during intense exercise, starches provide more muscle energy than dried fruit.

The hummus powder comes from Fantastic Foods. It should be mixed with 1 cup cold water and the olive oil. This powder clumps easily, so you should be quick to stir it vigorously after adding the water. After you have a smooth paste, stir in the olive oil. If you like, you could add some garlic powder or other seasoning to the hummus powder when you repackage it before your trip.

If you need more information about Ak-Mak whole wheat crackers, you’ll have to telephone the bakery in Sanger, California at (209) 875-5511, because they don’t have a Web site.

If you would like to play with this menu, you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Cheese is high in fat, which is why I allow only 3 ounces per person. Goat cheese keeps better without refrigeration than cow cheese and oozes less grease. The dried cherries go very nicely with the cheese. The nutritional values for the dried cherries are derived from the USDA database values for fresh sweet cherries, with water reduced from 82% to 30%. The cherries are very satisfying and it’s hard to eat large amounts of them, which is why I’ve included apples as a second fruit.

As with the hummus lunch, this menu provides the optimum backpacker’s balance of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. 51% of net carbs are sugars, compared with the hummus lunch’s 43%. This means that you’ll have slightly less muscular glycogen at your disposal than with the starchier hummus lunch.

If you would like to play with this menu, you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

This meal is a little lower in fat and a little higher in protein than the other two lunches. In case you don’t already know, kippered herring is smoked fish that comes in flat 4.75 ounce cans. The rye crackers are of the Scandinavian crispbread variety. 200 grams of dried pears allows 5–6 pieces per person. One ounce of Brazil nuts allows about 4 nuts per person. This may seem skimpy, but nuts are high in fat and a more aesthetically correct serving size would skew the nutritional balance of this meal. Complex and simple carbohydrates are evenly balanced.

Some Gouda cheese would be very tasty here, but chances are that you’d be too full to eat it after everything else. It would also skew the fat and protein content too high, but if you’re less rigorous about sports nutrition than I am, you might not care.

If you would like to play with this menu, you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet. In case you have a spreadsheet program that’s unable to open Excel files—or in case you just want to see the math—I provide a diagram of how to set up the spreadsheet from scratch.