Do You Really Know What’s In Your Nutritional Bar?
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Nutritional bars are among the most popular ready-to-eat foods. Since the first energy bars were introduced in the 1980s, a wide range of nutritional bars have now lined up grocery shelves, marketed as either diet bars, meal replacement bars or protein bars .
Ideally, a nutritional bar provides a solution for your need for a convenient, nutrient-dense, concentrated, filling and delicious food that you can eat anywhere. But don’t be easily deceived by the slick advertising and the hype because many nutritional bars are anything but nutritious.
When independent company ConsumerLab.com conducted tests in 2001 and analyzed 30 nutritional bars for levels of calories, carbohydrates, cholesterol, fats, proteins, sugar and sodium, they found that 60 percent of the products had misleading labels.
Many bars contained an average of 8 grams more sugar than indicated on the labels while others had as much as 2-to-3-times more saturated fat and sodium.
That was almost a decade ago. The quality of nutritional bars has improved since then and many products now satisfy industry standards for honest labeling.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can randomly pick any bar and hope that it would be good for you. The most recent testing showed that some bars have high amounts of total fats, which can be attributed to whole food ingredients like nuts. Other bars were found to have high levels of sugar alcohols, which are typically added to reduce the total calorie count because they have fewer calories than sugar itself.
Sugar alcohols have fewer calories than sugar because your body cannot fully absorb them and because of this, consuming foods containing sugar alcohol can give you abdominal gas, diarrhea, headaches and stomachaches.
Besides sugar alcohols, food manufacturers still use unhealthy ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and soy proteins in their nutritional bars because the former is a cheap sweetener and the latter is an inexpensive protein source.
What Makes for a Truly Healthy Nutritional Bar?
Because he has never been satisfied with even best available bars on the market, Dr. Joseph Mercola decided to create his own natural health bar. Dr. Mercola’s cocoa cassava bar is a chocolate bar, natural energy bar, healthy protein bar and meal replacement bar rolled into one – reasons why it has become one of his bestselling recommended products.
However, convinced that he can still improve his health bar, Dr. Mercola went back to the drawing board, did the research and set the goal of producing the most health-promoting and best tasting food bar in the market today.
Enter Dr. Mercola’s new and improved organic cocoa cassava bars. Like the original bar, the new cocoa cassava gives you the same balance of smart fats, protein and fiber, but this time, the new formula features USDA-certified organic ingredients, including organic cassava flour, organic unsweetened coconut, organic dark chocolate and organic raw chia seeds.
The “USDA Organic” seal means the cocoa cassava bar was made with only the finest quality ingredients and gives you the peace of mind knowing that you’re eating something that’s truly good for you. This premium product will soon be available online so keep posted!
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