Otis Who? Healthy Muffins For The NexGen!

Now you have a different kind of muffin to enjoy

Once upon a time in my life as a graduate student I had a job as a portable food vendor in the Virginia Beach, Virginia area called Corporate Cafe. Yep, I would arrive early in the morning and load up a big cooler full of sandwiches, sodas, juice, bagels, cookies, and muffins to make my rounds at the nearby car dealerships and golf shops selling all of these high-carb garbage foods just to pull in a few bucks while I was attending graduate school. I'm not proud of it now, but it was just a job at the time and my nearly 400-pound self didn't mind eating away the profits on a regular basis.

One of the most popular and bestselling items I sold was the muffins made by a baked goods company called Otis Spunkmeyer. Their humongously gigantic muffins were very appealing to the eye because of their jumbo size and the perceived value for the money you spent on them. Nevermind all that nasty white flour, corn syrup, artificial colors, and sugar they load into these things which were nothing but bad news for both your weight and health. People loved 'em then and probably still drool over them now.

It's been nearly 15 years ago that I had that food vendor job and I sold those Otis Spunkmeyer muffins for a couple of bucks at the time. Now that I'm livin' la vida low-carb in the 21st century, though, I have longed to find a company that could come up with a similar kind of muffin as those ones I used to sell except make them healthy. If people are willing to shell out that kind of money for an Otis Spunkmeyer muffin, then how much more valuable would a low-carb equivalent be?

Well, you wait is now over thanks to a company I found called R&B/NexGen™ Foods. This brand new healthy living business has dedicated itself to bringing great-looking and excellent-tasting quality low-carb foods to the market to enjoy as part of your healthy lifestyle. Founded and led by Dr. Peter Radatti and Dr. Keith Berkowitz (husband of the awesome Valerie Berkowitz, formerly worked with the late Dr. Robert C. Atkins at his Atkins Center For Complementary Medicine, and you may recall he was the one who helped Men's Health editor David Schipper lose 33 pounds last year on a low-carb diet), they are hoping to provide superb foods for the next generation (thus the name of their company--NexGen!).

Their very first product introduced to the marketplace are those amazing ready-to-eat morsels of low-carb goodness you see displayed so beautifully at the top of this post called NexGen™ Muffins. Each super-sized 4-ounce muffin is available in three delicious and nutritious flavors for you to enjoy: Lemon Poppy Seed, Banana Walnut, and Orange Pineapple.

As soon as I saw "egg" as the very first ingredient in these muffins instead of high fructose corn syrup or white flour, then I knew this was going to be a special product indeed for people who are livin' la vida low-carb. They have a proprietary blend of fiber as well as natural poppy seeds and walnuts baked right in them. Mmmm. Plus, they use the much-healthier butter instead of margarine, natural flavors, no preservatives, and just a tiny bit of sucralose (Splenda) and canola oil to make them turn out exactly right.

I have personally tried all three flavors and can personally attest that they really do taste as good as they look! Even better is the nutritional content in each half-muffin serving size--a miniscule 2g net carbs, 100% sugar-free, just 80 calories, only 5g fat, 50 percent of your RDA for calcium, and a whopping 12g dietary fiber in each power-packed half-muffin serving! This ain't some chintzy low-carb pretender product, people--it's most definitely a high-quality real deal food you will immediately fall in love with for all the right reasons.

Additionally, you won't find ANY trans fats (those terrible partially hydrogenated oils that are bad news for you), modified food starches, wheat gluten, soy flour, sugar alcohols (YEAH, no maltitol!), chemical preservatives, artificial colors, food additives, GMOs, or grains in the NexGen™ Muffins. In other words, they're REAL food! :)

What about diabetics? Can they have these marvelous muffins? Well, because they are completely sugar-free and very low-carb, absolutely these are the perfect food choice for a diabetic to consume. How about someone with Celiac disease or a gluten intolerance? Again, these are gluten-free and wheat-free products, so people with that disease can eat these with confidence. However, the minority of you who are like me and are salt-sensitive should be aware that each half-muffin serving has 250 milligrams of sodium--which is plenty low as long as you don't eat three in a single day (I know it'll be tempting!).

The key ingredient in NexGen™ Muffins is the incredible patent-pending "fiber flour" substitute that provides much more fiber than the average American consumes on a daily basis. As people who are livin' la vida low-carb already know, fiber is a vital part of your healthy lifestyle change, so getting ample amounts in your diet is crucial.

Since both soluble and insoluble fiber is not digested by your body, it does not get absorbed into the bloodstream like sugar and other refined carbohydrates so readily do. That's one reason consuming fiber on low-carb is so good for you. It also helps promote regularity, removes toxins from your body, balances the acid that lingers in your intestines, binds with fatty acids to improve your lipid profile, and greatly slows the digestion of carbohydrates so your blood sugar remains stablized.

In fact, there has been plenty of published research that indicates fiber is also helpful for lowering blood pressure, dropping LDL and total cholesterol, warding off weight gain, and even significantly reducing the risk of such epidemic health ailments as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and Type II diabetes. This sorta begs the question--why isn't EVERYONE eating more fiber? That's why we need more products like NexGen™ Muffins.

Okay, I'm sure you are thinking all of this talk about health is great and all, but do they really taste as good as they look? All I can say about that is I've eaten about a dozen of these muffins over the past couple of weeks and can verifiably say that they have an incredible texture along with a naturally sweet taste. Far too often you get a funky wang or a gritty feeling in your mouth with some low-carb products. But not with NexGen™ Muffins because the creators have taken great pains to do these the right way.

If I had one minor criticism about them, then it would be that they can be a little hard to swallow from being so dry with the tons of fiber that are in them. But I came up with a solution to that problem rather quickly. After you heat the muffin in the microwave for about a minute (or a little bit longer if it's still frozen), stick a pat of butter on top and let it ooze down inside and along the sides to moisten the muffin. Another trick that works is slicing it open with a slit at the top and pour some whipping cream over it in a bowl. The opportunities to be creative with these muffins is literally endless!

This is the very first ready-to-eat low-carb muffin product I have ever seen on the market and I expect it will do very well with the right kind of publicity and distribution. There are plenty of low-carb muffin mixes available, but not ones that you can just pop in the microwave to warm up and in seconds be ready to devour as part of your low-carb lifestyle. With NexGen™ Muffins, now you can!

Because these muffins don't have any preservatives in them like the aforementioned high-carb Otis Spunkmeyer ones do, they do not have a very long shelf life apart from remaining frozen. They must be kept in a freezer and can then be transferred to a refrigerator with a 7-day shelf life. I keep three in the fridge at a time and move a frozen one down to replace the muffins I consume. It's a different way to look at muffins, but they are radically different from those garbage ones you are accustomed to.

The creators of these superb new NexGen™ low-carb products are now working on other products that they hope to introduce to the market in the near future, including ready-to-eat pizza, tortilla wraps, and dinner rolls--no doubt all of them will use the same high-quality "fiber flour" substitute in place of traditional white flour. I can't wait! I'll look forward to telling you about those when they hit the market. You'll be the first to know! :D

If you have any specific questions about the R&B/NexGen™ Foods line of low-carb products or if you are a retailer interested in selling these fantastic foods for your customers, then please e-mail them anytime at info@nexgenfoods.com. Be sure to tell them you read about their company from Jimmy Moore at the "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb" blog. THANKS and enjoy eating healthy for a change!

ORDER NOW from CarbSmart and stock up on these amazing muffins!