Summer vegetables & banana muffins

Grilled veggies are one of my summertime eats. I like to make foil packets and use Italian dressing for seasoning.

Still not tired of 5 week fennel salad. It makes a perfect picnic dish[don?t worry, your friends will probably like it too].

Banana muffins from a new VegWeb recipe. No butter or eggs required, and you can also use whole wheat flour. Add dark chocolate chips if you want?you won?t regret it. Speaking of chocolate?

Recently, Attune contacted me to taste test and review three of their probiotic-filled chocolate bars {although the bars were free to me, there was no money involved, and these opinions are my own}. As a scientifically minded nutritionist and someone who has worked with bacteria in the past, I had some extra questions for Annelies, Attune?s most gracious Online Community Manager.

Most beneficial bacteria such as lactobacilli are heat sensitive and making chocolate bars generally involves melting and other heat-related activities, so I wanted to know what steps Attune takes to ensure their product contains live bugs.

Annelies assured me that the chocolate manufacturing process does not affect the viability of the probiotic strains and that the bars have been tested to to ensure that the probiotics are still live and confer health benefits after processing.

Another question I had was about how many CFU or colony forming units each bar contains. Products claiming to offer ?live active cultures? must contain at least 108 live lactic acid organisms per gram. Attune bars are 0.7 oz or 19.8 grams and contain 6.1 billion CFUs of three of the most clinically tested strains [1.8 x 1010 CFU total/19.8 grams = 9.1 x 108 CFU/gram].

I loved the taste of Attune?s bars, especially the mint chocolate flavor. Other reasons to like Attune:

The downside is the expense?at $1.52 a pop, you could easily spend over $10 for a week?s worth of bars. Otherwise, it was nice to eat chocolate with some added health benefits, and I enjoyed sampling Attune?s products!

Back to studying?someone?s taking the RD exam this week!