I recently wrote an article about how to eat healthy on the trail. However, I decided to cover the best hiking snacks in a separate article. I will mention the five best hiking snacks and provide some information about why they are great for hiking. All the snacks in this article are chosen for multiday hikes. After reading this, you should know exactly what hiking snacks to buy.
Bringing the right snacks on a hike can be more important than you would think. The best hiking snacks can be different for different people. This depends on your personal preferences, but also on your hiking diet. For example, if you don’t include a lot of protein in your breakfast, lunch or dinner, it is a good idea to bring some high protein snacks. In this article, I will go a bit more in detail about what fuels your body need and how bringing the right snacks can help you with refueling those. Additionally, I will include a list with the five best hiking snacks.
Balancing your diet
It is not easy to balance your diet when you are out hiking. It is especially hard if you do not use dehydrated food because most of your food will spoil pretty quickly. This may lead to an unbalanced diet, which may eventually lead to health issues.
I’m not saying you have to start counting your calories. That would be crazy. However, you should have a general understanding of what you put into your body. Having this knowledge might make you understand why you feel how you feel.
As I said before, the best hiking snacks are different for different people. Think about what meals you will eat on your adventure, and use this knowledge to decide what snacks to bring. If your diet does not include a lot of carbohydrates, add some crackers to your snack bag. If you lack protein, go for beef jerky or protein bars instead.
Additionally, you should think about the amount of vitamins you are taking in. You could consider bringing some dried fruit or vegetables to make your adventure a healthier experience.
If you don’t know the nutrition facts of certain food, you can simply add “nutrition facts” to your google search. For example, if you want to know the nutrition facts for crackers, google “cracker nutrition facts”.
Hiking snacks for energy
We already understand the value of snacking when it comes to balancing our diet. It is also really important to realize that we burn a lot of energy (calories) when we are hiking. We have to refill those burned calories as good as possible and snacking will help us with that.
When you are thinking about what hiking snacks to buy, try to get as many calories for the same weight/size. Therefore, you will be able to get more energy without having to carry more.
Five of the best hiking snacks
Now that we know why it matters what snacks we bring while we are hiking, let’s take a look at the actual list. These are five of the best hiking snacks based on nutrition values, preservability, convenience and taste. I will include a link for each snack, in case you would be interested to buy these online.
The brands I will recommend are definitely decent products. However, I did not try out every single brand. If you prefer any other brand feel free to let me know. You should be able to find most of these products at your favorite local store as well.
Whenever you research a snack, you can go to www.myfitnesspal.com and try to find your specific product. Quite often this website will be able to provide you with the nutrition facts. Additionally you can check out some taste reviews. You don’t just want a healthy snack, it should be tasty as well.
Beef jerky
Beef jerky is one of the most popular hiking snacks out there and with good reason. Let’s take a deeper look at why this is one of the best hiking snacks.
- The meat is completely dried and will not spoil
- It contains a lot of protein
- A lot of calories for its weight (because the meat is completely dehydrated)
- Tastes good
- Requires no preparation
It’s just not that easy to bring meat on a multiday hike. However, you can bring beef jerky without a problem. If you own a food dehydrator you could prepare this yourself. If not, you should be able to buy this at your local store or you could buy it from amazon by clicking here.
Dried fruit
Why should you bring dried fruit on your hiking trip? Because you need those vitamins. You could bring some supplements to make up for your lack of vitamin intake, but it is highly advisable to just get the vitamins from real food sources. You could also bring fresh fruit, but those will spoil eventually and they will take up more space and weigh more. Therefore, I would recommend bringing some dried fruit.
Whatever dried fruit mix you decide to buy, make sure to check the nutrition facts. It is pretty important to go with a fruit mix where no additional sugars were added. If you own a food dehydrator you could create a mix of dried fruit yourself.
Once again, it shouldn’t be too hard to find this at a local store. However, if you want to buy it from amazon, here is the link.
Granola
Granola is not only great for breakfast, it could also be a perfect snack. It is a very good source of carbohydrates. Granola consists of oats, nuts and honey (or sometimes other sweeteners). Sometimes dried fruit is added as well. Basically it’s a mix of a lot of good things.
Granola is often eaten with milk or yogurt. However, it can still be delicious without any of that. You can also buy this in the form of bars. Be aware that bars tend to have a lot more sugar, which is not optimal, but it can still be a good snack.
The cool thing about granola, there are tons of different flavours out there. One of the best granola packs you can buy only is the gr8nola cereal healthy snack. However, feel free to check out the other products because it highly depends on personal flavours.
Almonds
Almonds are often found in granola and mix trails. Those two are great snacks on their own, so it should not be a surprise to see that almonds are on the list. There are plenty of nuts that can be considered a healthy hiking snack, but almonds are still the number one. Almonds contain a lot of high quality fat and they contain a fair amount of protein. Also 575 kcal for 100 grams of almonds is a really good deal.
If you don’t like to eat plain almonds you could always include this in any kind of mix. If you just don’t like almonds, cashews or walnuts are great alternatives as well. Raw almonds are arguably a better choice over roasted and salted almonds. However, a lot of hikers prefer roasted and salted because of the taste and because they help with the electrolyte balance.
You can buy raw almonds by clicking this link, if you prefer roasted almonds click here instead.
Protein bars
It is no secret that I am a big fan of protein bars. There are multiple reasons for this.
Let’s state the obvious first. It contains protein. As I often stated before, a lot of people do not get their required daily amount of protein while hiking. Bringing some protein bars is an easy way to help you get those protein.
You should always be careful when you buy protein bars. Different protein bars have different nutrition values. Some of these protein bars are more like candy bars. Don’t assume that a bar is healthy or has a lot of high quality protein just because it has the word protein in its name. Let’s have a closer look at two examples.
The first example is one of amazon’s most popular protein bars: CLIF BAR – Energy Bar – Blueberry Crisp.
Let’s look at the nutrition values of this bar:
- Fat: 5g
- Protein: 9g
- Carbohydrates: 44g
These values are not really what we expect from a protein bar. The amount of carbohydrates are five times as high than the amount of proteins. The package does not state that this is a high protein bar, but rather an energy bar. However, amazon does label this as a protein bar. So make sure that you always take a quick look at the nutrition values.
Now I’m not stating this is a bad product, it’s just not really what I’m looking for in a protein bar. I obviously want a higher amount of protein.
I did some more research and found a bar with better nutrition values for my needs. This one is called Quest Nutrition Protein Bar.
Once again, let’s start by looking at the nutrition values:
- Fat: 9g
- Protein: 21g
- Carbohydrates: 20g
These values are a lot more fitting for my needs. The ratio of having 20% fat, 40% protein and 40% carbohydrates in your bar is a pretty good deal.
You could also consider bringing some protein powder. Because it has even better nutrition values. However, as a snack, I prefer to have some bars because it is really convenient and it does not require you to prepare anything.
Create your own snacks
Almost all the snacks I mentioned in this article can be made at home. This will save you a lot of money in the long run and you control exactly what goes into your snacks. In order to create snacks that won’t spoil you will have to abstract the water from it. You can do this by using a food dehydrator.
You can use the food dehydrator to dry your beef and create beef jerky. You could also decide to create you own protein bars. Now you don’t have to dehydrate those homemade protein bars, but they will last a lot longer if you do. If you are bringing them on a multiday hiking trip you should definitely consider doing this.
The Excalibur food dehydrator is considered the best food dehydrator you can buy online. It comes with nine trays, meaning you can dehydrate a lot of food at the same time. Additionally it is just a very high quality product. It is faster, more convenient and results in better tasting food. Therefore, it is my number one recommendation.
I dedicated an entire blog post to review this specific food dehydrator, you can find this review by clicking here.
The only downside to the Excalibur food dehydrator is that the price is a little bit high. Don’t get me wrong it is definitely worth the money. However, some of you are just on a tight budget and I can understand that. So I did some more research and tried to find a budget friendly food dehydrator.
The FD-1010 Gardenmaster Pro Food Dehydrator would be the budget food dehydrator I am recommending. It is a lot cheaper than the Excalibur food dehydrator and it is easily expandable. The quality and speed of this product are not as good as the Excalibur, but it is still very decent.
You can get a little bit creative when you create your own snacks. You could make your own trail mix with dried fruit, nuts and maybe even some granola. You could create your own nutrition bars or bites. Additionally you can experiment with your dehydrator a little bit, you don’t have to stick with beef, you could try out turkey jerky or even salmon jerky.
Conclusion
Doing a little research about your hiking snacks before you buy them is really important. In this article, I showed you five of the best hiking snacks, but I also told you about how should research your hiking snacks. The next time you are buying snacks before going on an adventure, make sure to quickly check the nutrition values.
I have talked a lot about nutrition values, calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc… But let’s not forget about the taste. Buying snacks that you actually enjoy eating is probably the most important thing in the end. Just try to buy the healthiest enjoyable snacks.
Did you agree with my ideas about the best hiking snacks? Or can you come up with a better list of hiking snacks? Let me know in the comments below.