Protein Bars Are WORSE than Candy Bars!!!

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, I’m going to compare the ingredients of popular protein bars, but first, let’s compare a Snickers bar to a protein bar! A 50-gram Snickers bar contains 30 grams of carbs and is about 58% sugar.

CLIF Builder's protein bars are 68 grams and are about 41% sugar, with the same number of carbohydrates as Snickers. The extra carbs in the CLIF bar come from starches that quickly turn into sugar in the blood. CLIF Builder's bars contain 20 grams of protein but in the form of soy protein concentrate, a low-quality protein. Like most protein bars, they're also full of ultra-processed ingredients.

CLIF energy bars are 68 grams and 55.88% sugar. Despite their name, they will not give you sustainable energy, just a tiny spike followed by a crash.

KIND bars make several claims, such as “#1 ingredient=heart healthy peanuts," “low glycemic index,” “dairy-free,” and “non-GMO.” They contain glucose syrup, which is not a low-glycemic-index ingredient, along with sugar, honey, palm oil, soy protein isolate, and chicory root fiber.

Quest birthday cake bars contain 9 grams of sugar alcohol, which can lead to GI problems like gas, bloating, and diarrhea. They’re 41% sugar and also contain polydextrose, which hasn’t been studied much in humans.

Pure Protein bars claim to have only 2 grams of sugar, but they contain 17 grams of carbohydrates and only 1 gram of fiber. These bars contain 14 grams of starches, equivalent to 4 more teaspoons of sugar!

The ONE protein bar is a 60-gram product containing 20 grams of protein and only 1 gram of sugar, but it has 25 grams of carbs from starches and cellulose, which is essentially sawdust. It also contains maltitol, an ingredient you’ll want to avoid.

The MET-Rx meal replacement bar contains 48 grams of carbohydrates and ingredients such as rice starch, maltitol syrup, corn syrup, fructose, and soy protein isolate.

Next, let’s look at the ingredients of an A.M. RXBAR. They contain 10 grams of protein, oats, cashews, egg whites, and honey. However, the front label is misleading because these bars contain several other ingredients, 52% of which are sugar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	the shocking truth about protein bars.
0:03.2	Protein bars are a huge industry.
0:05.9	What's in the ingredients?
0:07.2	Let's first start with an actual candy bar.
0:11.2	And then we're going to do a comparison with all the healthy protein bars.
0:14.6	Now if we take the Snickers Bar, a 50-Gram bar, 30 grams of carbs, 25 grams of that is sugar.
0:21.5	So basically we're talking about 58% of this bar is sugar and when you look at the first
0:26.2	ingredient that makes up most of this bar and the first ingredient is milk chocolate the second is peanuts and the third corn syrup.
0:34.5	Pretty darn high in the glycemic index.
0:36.4	Then we have actual sugar and then it has salt, egg whites, palm oil,
0:41.1	butter, skim milk, lactose, which is milk sugar, and peanuts.
0:45.2	So that's what makes up a Snickers Bar.
0:47.5	Now remember that as we go through these protein bars, because somehow there's a perception that these protein bars are healthier than a candy bar.
0:56.8	The first one I want to go through is this one right here.
1:00.0	This is a cliff bar.
1:01.2	So this cliff bar is 68 grams, okay, so it's a cliff bar. So this cliff bar is 68 grams.
1:04.0	Okay, so it's a little more than the candy bar.
1:06.1	And whereas the candy bar is 58% sugar,
1:10.5	this one is merely 41% sugar, but they have virtually the same amount of
1:16.3	carbohydrates except for the clip war has like one more carbohydrates. So this is
1:20.8	31 grams of carbohydrate and there's 3 grams of fiber so you deduct that and you get 28 net carbs.
1:29.0	Okay, and then we have 17 grams of sugar.
	...

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