Element Bars have just launched a site where you can make your own protein/power/nutrition bars by picking your ingredients from the website and buying them in packs of 36.
It’s a great idea as I don’t like the commercial nutrition bars available - they are always too sweet and make me feel sick as I don’t like sugar. I’d like to eat protein bars after working out but I don’t as I feel like I’ve stuffed my face with chocolate - sickly sweet flavour overload.
So I love the idea of building my own - I’d make them full of oats and nuts and maybe a bit of fruit, but nothing with any sugar, honey, syrup, sweeteners, or anything else I don’t want.
Unfortunately Element Bars is American, meaning even the base ingredients are overloaded with sugars. You can pick a base (from crispy to oaty to datey and chewy) but you don’t get to say “don’t sweeten them”.
They even mention that they have a touch of honey (meaning overload) or “a bit of sweet, a bit of salty”.
So before you even begin adding anything, there’s 22 grams of sugar. Blechh. According to the internet (source of all truth) a teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams. So 5 teaspoons of sugar in a health bar? Might as well drink a Coke with it.
Then you can add dried fruit (sweetened of course), and then if that’s not enough sugar for you, you can also add maple syrup, agarve syrup (sweetener from cactus), honey, chocolate chips and M&Ms.
So there you have it, 33 grams of sugar, 216 calories and 14 grams of fat. Perfect to shovel into your gob after a workout to completely undo any good effect a run was having on your body, and then wonder why you weren’t losing weight…
This post is tagged under: innovation, random thoughts
