How to Choose a Healthy Cereal or Snack Bar

I love a healthy snack bar, which is why I’ve come up with my top 5 tips on how to make sure it’s a healthy one! Do let me know what your favourite snack bars are in the comments section below – I always love finding new ones to try! 🙂

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1. Check the Label. Avoid snack bars where either the first or second ingredient is sugar, glucose or syrup (ingredients are always listed with the largest first). These sugary ingredients contain nothing apart from calories – no goodness, no vitamins and no minerals (and they can cause teeth decay too). For a healthy diet it’s best to cut down on added sugars as much as possible i.e. not adding sugar to hot drinks, using fruit instead of sugar to sweeten cereals or using a natural sweetener in place of sugar, such as stevia.
2. Read the Ingredients List. Choose a snack bar that is based around fruit or oats. Fruit and oats have a low glycaemic index which means that they release their energy slowly, keeping you fuller for longer! Fruit is packed with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants to keep us healthy and both oats and fruit are a great source of soluble fibre which lowers cholesterol levels in the blood.
3. Monitor the Calories. If you’re watching your weight, make sure to choose a snack bar that has no more than 200 Kcal. The average male needs around 2,500 Kcal a day to maintain his weight and females need around 2,000 Kcal. For weight loss these figures drop to 2,000 Kcal for men and 1,500 Kcal for women.
4. Don’t be Fooled. Snack bars that make claims such as being only ’99 Calories’ or ‘Light’ are lower in calorie usually due to one thing – less fat. Products that take out the fat however usually substitute it with one thing.. sugar(!). We NEED healthy fats in our diets, and for health we should be eating more monounsaturated fat from vegetables e.g. olive oil and avocados and less saturated fat which is found in fatty meats and full fat dairy products.
5. Make your Own! If you make your own snack bars then YOU decide exactly what goes into it. Check out my healthy snack bar recipes for inspiration. Snack bars really are fun to make and you can save a small fortune!

 

I hope you’ve found this blog useful! And in case you’re wondering (and don’t fancy baking your own), my fave snack bars from the shops are: 9bars, nakd bars, Frank bars, Jordans cereal bars and Lara bars!