Health bars are NOT always as healthy as they seem

Don't be taken in by the hype around health bars, writes Andrea Burgener

Next time your children are doing their English homework and come to you for help with an example of an oxymoron, it's easy: health bar.

How any of us got tricked into putting these weird foodstuffs on a higher footing than the worst sort of cereal or a doughnut is hard to say.

Well, I guess the words health or muesli or energy on the bar might have something to do with it.

I've been testing and checking out a whole stack of them over the last few weeks and have come away even more convinced that you'd be better off going straight for the sugar high with some excellent chocolate or nougat or even Coco-Pops, and actually get a good dose of emotional nourishment from feeling that you've had your bit of indulgence.

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The problem with the energy/health/vitamin/muesli-whatever bars is that you believe they've constituted some of your nutrition for the day. That they're akin to broccoli in bar form. And then you probably still chow down on the chocolate or the doughnut.

All of them profess different levels of amazingness: some boast about having vitamins (well, so does chocolate), no preservatives (neither do marshmallows), no soy (well, wow, that's no incredible achievement) and so on.

But the real issue is sugar.

Almost every single one of these bars, from the so-called Paleo Bar (which is completely out of sync with the actual Paleo diet) to the Monkey Bar (priced at about Lindt level per weight and tasting like nothing more than compressed dried fruit) to the more basic Jungle Oats bar, have more sugar by weight than the Coco-Pops.

Why is the Coco-Pops better? Because although they now do try the same trick with the nutritional gumph, we know that it can't stand in for lunch. Oh yes, and because it tastes much nicer. All that sugar in the bars and they still taste like punishment and austerity.

As for the so-called ''high protein" aspect, most of these bars have the same or lower protein percentage than the average crappy supermarket loaf.

And the ones that claim to be low GI? Well, just like most GI claims, I would say you can pretty much ignore that information wherever fruit - dried or fresh - or fructose of any kind is involved.

Fructose doesn't spike blood sugar levels the way that sucrose does because it's metabolised in the liver. But that doesn't mean it's doing you any good.

Research indicates that it's just as bad, perhaps worse, only through a different process.

Hungry? Have an actual meal. Hungry while driving or climbing Mount Everest? Eat a packet of nuts or some biltong. Craving something sweet? Go for that really good chocolate.

Health bars? There's no role they can possibly fill.

• This article was originally published in The Times.