Survival Candy for Emergencies

Survival Candies: the Most Underestimated Survival Product

When it comes to survival prepping, even the most well-informed people will buy lots of cans, sleeping bags, water, and high-quality clothing but will forget about some sweets, thinking that it is not important to include emergency candies in your bug-out bags.

However, there are a lot of reasons why you would absolutely need them, and we are not talking about diabetics: these people will know for themselves that they will not survive out in the wild without their sweets when they will start to run out of their pills.

Reasons why Survival Candies Could be Helpful

For some of you, it might be shocking that such a term as survival candies even exists, and let us tell you that not all the candies that you have tasted in your usual life would count as survival treats. Thus, you could consider a candy to be a survival one not only if it tastes good, but if it helps you to increase your energy levels, provides you with an additional source of calories, and can be considered a long-term food that would not spoil for a long time.

• Packing a bunch of survival candies might even save your life. For instance, if you found yourself in a crisis situation with nothing packed for a survival bug-out bag, taking only the sweets, water, and warm clothes would save you for a few days while you are searching for a proper meal or trying to pack your bag with other essential things.

• However, if you plan to make a survival bag in advance, pack something more serious than candies inside because you definitely will not survive for a long time on such a small amount of calories.

• The main thing for which survival candies are good food is the boost of energy that they could provide you with. Imagine yourself sitting outside your tent on a night watch when your family is asleep: this is exactly the case when you would need to stay awake in order for all of you to stay safe, and a few survival candies packed with you as part of your emergency food storage will help you to complete this task.

• What is more, modern survival candies have been upgraded so that now they are not only sugar and syrup. These days, you can find candies that even have essential vitamins and caffeine inside them, ensuring that you would receive something more from them than a simple blood sugar increase.

• For instance, as survival conditions do not allow us to eat as properly as we did before, our vitamin C concentration in blood can fall down very much, which could in turn produce a disease called scurvy. Fortunately for us, almost all the survival candies have vitamin C and citric acid inside them, which is why it might be important to buy survival sweets instead of the usual ones. Eating candies to cure your scurvy is much more pleasant than drinking pine needle for the same purpose, don’t you think?

• In addition, such vitamins can reduce your sugar withdrawals and cravings, meaning that you would not get attached to eating survival sweets as much as you would have to the traditional ones.

You could even benefit from eating candies on your sick days: popsicles will help you to keep your mouth from being dry as well as ease your sore throat pains.

What Science has to Say About Sugar

We all know that eating too many sweets will damage your organism and blood system, especially, but you might also want to learn that candies are not completely bad. Thus, when you are eating something sweet, you activate your Mesolithic dopamine system, the one that ensures that you feel happy and satisfied.

And in the case of day-to-day life, you might have a chance to receive enough daily satisfaction from other things, but when it comes to survival conditions, almost everything is frightening and unpleasant, which means that having a few survival candies might even help you to keep on going a little further.

What is more, do not forget that such small things as candy can help us to increase our motivation to do something, no matter the circumstances. Thus, when you need to practice some survival skills a bit more but have no desire or energy to do so, promising yourself a little treat will go a long way: you will create a certain routine for yourself and make the unpleasant action easier to get done.

But in case you decide to actually go with this idea, you need to remember that you will need to take care of your teeth properly and eat a lot of other goods aside from the sweets. Otherwise, you will come out of any survival crisis that has happened to you as a broken person with digestion problems and ruined teeth.

Survival Candy Choice

Choosing the right kind of candy as your survival treat is also of special importance for people diagnosed with diabetes. You guys might need some sugar in case your pills will run out, but you will need a particular kind of sweets that are not made directly from sugar. However, if you are making an emergency food storage in advance, it should not be a problem for you to find such kinds of treats, especially on the current market where everybody can find any food and candies that they need.

Whatever the candy that you would like to choose as a survival one, please check that it coincides with the following list of criteria:

• It has a long shelf life. 72-hour kits are good when you are packing on the go, but if we are talking about a more serious preparation, you would need to make sure that the goods you are buying, candies included, will be safe to eat after a few months of storage. If not, revise your inventory once a month to throw out damaged goods and replace them with fresh ones;
• It is safe for you to eat. Whatever medical condition you have or intolerance to particular goods, you need to make sure that you will not become sick after consuming them in survival conditions. You being sick will not ease the life out in the wilderness for you or anyone else who you are traveling with;
• It has some healthy ingredients aside from sugar. The current market is capable of providing you with sweets that not only will raise your blood sugar rates but will help your organism to receive essential chemicals as well. This can be some vitamins included in the sweets or caffeine that will increase your energy levels more proficiently.

You might also want to consider some alternatives to sugar-based survival candies, such as honey-based ones, or even the honey itself: this product is capable of being kept safe for a long time and still can provide you with the same levels of an energy boost as other candies. What is more, honey has a lower glycemic index, which means that it probably will do you more good than harm.

All in all, candies can actually help you out in the survival conditions, but like anything else in this life, you should not forget about balance, as without it, even the best things will turn into the worst. Thus, eating too many sweets will ruin your teeth and can even cause new allergies to appear. When you are out in the wild, it is hard to maintain the same level of hygiene or eating habits as they were before, so do not make it worse for yourself.

Making Survival Candies to Last Longer

Although we already said that you should choose candies as a survival treat only if they have a long shelf life, it is not exactly up to the candies themselves: the presence of a long-term food criterion depends more on the packaging of the candy, rather than on its type.

Thus, you would want your survival candies to have individual wrappings that are vacuum-sealed (in the best-case scenario). When you buy candies that conform with this point, you will have yourself a treat that will last as long as honey-based sweets.

You might even keep a chocolate bar in good condition for some time, but only if you make sure that it is dry, decently sealed, and placed in a dark and cool area.

However, if you would like to buy candies that do not have the same storage qualities or want to make them by yourself, there is still a solution how you could prolong the shelf life of your candies. You could buy moisture-removing packets that are usually used for other types of goods, but could be implemented for sweets as well. Mylar bags or light-proof jars could also do the trick and help you to keep your survival candies in a good condition for approximately three years. That, of course, if you continue to keep them that way for this period of time.

For those of you who plan to make the candies by themselves, we also might provide a little trick that might prolong the shell life of your homemade survival treats: instead of using the usual sugar or honey that could be easily dissolved under imperfect conditions, try adding dry-powdered sweeteners to your candies. That way, your candies will remain crystallized even underwater.

And for making the candies by yourself, you definitely will need to buy a freeze dryer. There is a whole collection of freeze dryers for you to look through on our website.

And if you are in need of candies that are not exactly sweet but help to keep you away and full of energy, then consider purchasing Military Energy Gums that you could easily find on the current market: their difference from all other candies is that they contain a lot of caffeine inside, which helps the soldiers and simple survival preppers to stay awake even during the night. 

Great Substitutes of Survival Candies

When you would like to shop for something more healthy and with more calories, you could also try survival bars. Yes, they will weigh a bit more and thus will take more space in your bug-out bags, but they will give you much more protein and vitamins than the usual survival candies!

Protein is rarely an option for survival candies, which is why bars would be a better snack that would allow you to combine your need for food and energy at the same time. And although they do have a bigger size, it is not likely that you would not find enough space for them.

In rare cases, you could even use survival protein bars as a replacement for a meal. Due to that, you might want to buy those bars that come in big packages with lots of different flavors for you to try out. And of course, we do not recommend you to replace your meals with protein bars, but it is not always the case that you have an opportunity to eat a healthier and more nutritious meal, which is why protein bars will come in handy in such situations!

There are other alternatives that you could buy nowadays, and if you want to, you could always look through them in our selection of pre-made desserts that will last for a long time.

There are many options that you could opt for these days, and protein bars can actually be gluten-free or vegan if that is what you need, which is why packing such sweets would only help you to stay on foot and continue with your journey.

All in all, survival candies or protein bars are actually a necessity in survival situations, especially if you had never been in one before. They could save your life, increase your motivation in harsh conditions, and provide you with essential vitamins or energy boosts when needed. But, of course, you should never choose them as a replacement for actual food.

About the guest contributor/author: Mike Millerson, of Survive Nature, is a former USA Army sergeant and a highly educated survivalist and prepper with a degree and interest in Engineering and Electronics. He applies his extensive expertise in survivalism, homesteading, backpacking, hiking and hunting, spreading his deep knowledge about handling emergencies and prepping for them reasonably and effectively.