GamerGrub: Performance Eats for Gamers
At this year's E3 we saw a press release we just couldn't ignore: food specifically designed for gamers. It not only advertises that it'll let players eat quickly without getting greasy, crumby fingers, but that it'll also boost their performance. Did it live up to its claims? Did it really leave our hands clean? And, more importantly, how does it taste? Read on to find out.
Gallery: Gamer Grub
GamerGrub is the product of Biosilo Foods, a starchy start-up that only makes one line of edibles, marketed for diners of a digital persuasion. It's intended to take the place of Doritos, Cheetos, and other easy-to-munch-on but unfortunately messy junk. But is GamerGrub junk food, too? Let's take a look at the numbers, comparing GamerGrub's Pizza flavor to Nacho Cheese Doritos. The serving size for Gamer Grub is 30 grams, and for that you get 9 grams of fat, 14 grams of carbs, 3 grams of protein, and 160 total calories. The same amount of Doritos gets you 8 grams of fat, 18 grams of carbs, 2.4 grams of protein, and 151 calories.
So, you wouldn't call it healthy at first glance, but Grub's 1 gram of saturated fat is a bit better than the Doritos' 3 grams, and there are far more vitamins and other good stuff in Pizza GamerGrub. The same is true of the other three flavors, which right now include PB&J, Wasabi, and Chocolate. And do they taste good? Yes. Yes, they do. Quite good, in fact. We were only able to sample the Pizza and PB&J flavors, but found both to be quite tasty. The Pizza flavor features an odd mix of cheesy and garlicky pita chips and almonds, while PB&J includes peanut butter chips, dried strawberries, peanuts, and dried bread chips.
The PB&J flavor did indeed live up to its advertising by leaving our hands clean after chowing down, but we were disappointed to find that the Pizza flavor left a good bit of flavorful residue on our fingertips. It was nowhere near the orange fingers you might get after a bag of Doritos, but we didn't feel particularly inclined to reach for a controller without grabbing a napkin first.
But reach for a controller we did, putting this stuff under a little bit of a test. We waited until a few hours after our last meal, when stomachs started grumbling and brains started fading, and ran through some Time Trial action in 'Mario Kart DS.' We chose the Mario Circuit and did a number of three-lap trials in Mario's B Dasher kart. As we practiced, our minds were constantly wandering to our empty stomachs, which made drifting and dashing tricky, meaning plenty of mistakes. Our best three-lap time after ten trials was 2:13:886. We then downed a serving each of PB&J and Pizza flavored Grub, waited the recommended 20 minute absorption time, and went to work again. We allowed ourselves another five trials and on the second managed a best time of 2:10:976, about a second per lap quicker. All three of the subsequent five trials were quicker than that first 2:13 mark we scored on an empty stomach.
So, is the unique formulation to blame for our increased performance? We're not quite ready to say that, but having a hearty snack to keep our stomachs happy certainly let us keep our minds on the game. And given the number of hearty ingredients here like nuts and fruit, we felt sated until dinner. So, a solid choice to fill yourself, with ingredients that are more like trail mix than puffed cheesy things, you can feel a lot less guilty when gobbling down a handful.
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