Go to the fitness and vitamin stores, or the fitness and vitamin section of your grocery story or wally world for the solutions.

I guess it depends a little on your weight profile going in, but if you are slightly overweight (ahem), then you can go a few days on the energy bars and protein drinks. EAS makes some pretty good protein shake type drinks that come in a soft "can" of sorts.

One issue with making a meal out of nuts and beef jerkey is that you get overloaded on salt, which in turn means you have to drink and overload of water, and then in turn can interfere with what you are doing when you need to urinate more often.

There are also some MRE entre equivalents available at a lot of places now. I know Safeway on the west coast carries them in the Italian food section. Cheese and salami can go for a couple days without refrigeration.

Not sure how many people here have really cooked with beans very much, but they take waaay to long to prepare for field use where you are trying to maximize your training time vs the time you are "out there". Likewise, I don't want to be taking hours out of a mission to sit and cook food in a fixed location that can compromise a mission. Beans are more of a retreat ration food than a field/operations ration food. Also, they can mess up your intestinal tract if they are not cooked long enough. The safest way to eat beans is to cook them for a very long time and then mash them. In theory this can be done in camp, but not on the trail in the bush.

Also, I dump and replace half the stuff out of my MREs anyway. I think those things end up being around 1/3 garbage that you have to hump. We used to call it "field stripping" the MREs.

Another excellent thing are the Power gel packs and the knockoffs. 5 hour energy min-bottle drinks. That sort of stuff.