Heather Bedard, C.H.E.
Walk down any snack bar aisle, in any grocery store in the U.S. and you are likely to find a growing number of “healthy” snack bars. Seems great, right? The only reason I would bother to write a whole article about them is that taking a deeper look at the marketing of them, and how they do it, can highly inform your choices, so that you can make the best choices for you and your family.
Just so I don’t harp on one particular brand, take your pick. Many of the brands that you see, feature a picture of someone attempting a really difficult feat like climbing a cliff or playing a sport. Pay attention to the pictures and colors that they use…chosen specifically to evoke a feeling in you, the buyer. For instance a brown packaging can subconsciously give you a feeling of earthiness or natural sourcing. Bright colors initiate feelings of energy. “Maybe, just maybe, if I have this bar, I'll have enough energy to climb a mountain.”
For the purpose of this article, we are going to skip over the nutrition facts label because these percentages can be manipulated by the food manufacturer. What I do want to focus on is the ingredient list. The ingredients of one particular brand of a “healthy” snack bar goes like this…Organic rolled oats, organic brown rice syrup, organic tapioca syrup, soy rice crisps (which are made of soy protein isolate), rice flour, barley malt extract, organic cane syrup, organic roasted soybeans, organic peanut butter, peanut flour, peanut and chicory fiber, organic soy flour, natural flavors, and sea salt. Not too many ingredients compared to some other brands. You can actually pronounce all of them, so that's not too bad. You'll also notice that a lot of the ingredients are organic.
Most people will be like, “Oh, wow! This sounds like a really great product. Let's go ahead and and buy it.” I do want to point something out to you before you run out and do that. Each one of these ingredients is listed in order of weight. You will have the highest weight in the beginning and then it goes down in descending order. Food manufacturers and marketing companies do something that I like to call divide and conquer. They know that you do not want to have a lot of sugary ingredients. You really want to be healthy, and this is a promoted as a healthy snack bar. Instead of having sugar up here at the top, they're going to divide it out and utilize many different types of sugars.
Let's go through our list again and see just how much sugar is actually in this little bar. After oats, we kick it off with brown rice syrup. That is another form of sugar. After that, we've got organic tapioca syrup. Again, another type of sugar. After that we have organic cane syrup. You might look and see that cane syrup is midway down. Hmmm, so not too bad. But we have to be aware that right above that, we've got two other types of syrups, which just means two other different forms of sugar. The company doesn’t say that sugar is the top ingredient by weight in this little bar because you probably wouldn't buy it.
Another really sneaky little thing that they do, is play around even more with what they call the sugar. We've already mentioned the syrup, but a little further down our list we have something called barley malt extract. It's also known as barley malt syrup or barley syrup or malt syrup. It goes by many different names, but this is another sweetener. It's added to kind of give a barley or nutty kind of taste to different products. However, it is still a sugar. Here in this 2.4oz bar, we already have four different types of sugar. Sugar by weight is actually the top ingredient in this bar.
I also want to point out that there is soy in this product. About 90% of the soy that you purchase in America is going to be genetically modified and people can often have adverse reactions to genetically modified foods. GMO’s can also cause inflammation. You would want to stay away from any kind of product that's going to include soy unless it's organic. If it's organic, you know that it's not genetically modified. Some people are concerned that soy will affect their estrogen levels. That comes from a misunderstanding of phytoestrogens, but there is more info about that in another article. This bar does have soy rice crisps, so there might be some type of genetically modified ingredient in here.
Next, we are going to talk about natural flavors. You'll typically see natural flavors at the very end of an ingredient list. Natural flavors have to come from a natural source. So that would be animal or plant products. They're generally made from spices, fruit or fruit juice, vegetables, yeast, herbs, bark, dairy products, meat, poultry, eggs, etc... The manufactures use these products to begin with, but by the time they are done processing it, the end result looks nothing like what it started as. It is important to keep in mind that any kind of flavor is going to be made of chemicals. That's just how flavors work. This means that there are going to be chemicals in your natural flavoring…they just started from a natural product first.
The way that they make these natural flavors is they heat or roast the derivative that they're using. So already heat's being applied to it. It's going to be processed. It doesn't contribute to the nutrition of the product whatsoever. In other words, it's just a flavoring. The marketing department of the brand knows that people like the sound of natural. At the end of the day, when you say natural flavorings, it's actually not that much better than a chemical flavoring.
You should also know that there is no FDA regulation on the use of the word natural so whatever that company wants it to mean, is what it means. They are not required to disclose the chemical makeup of that product. All-in-all some brands are better than others, but it may be in your best interest to find a more whole food plant-based option to eat for a snack.