The Internet’s Favorite Bar (Should They Be?): One Bars

A Bite-Size Read for Your Health and Waistline

I remember at one point in my dieting career, during my?Weight Watchers?era, there was a big focus on Fiber One bars. Years later, at my old full-time job, my coworkers would rave about the?One Bar. And it seems they weren’t the only ones! A recent, quick?Google?search touts them as one of the highest rated protein bars (along with best tasting) out on the market today. But what prompted me to take a deeper dive was an email from a client I had recently finished working with.

Her email told this story: She stopped at a gas station for a fill-up and a pick-me-up. She decided on something she hadn’t had in a long time…a maple glazed donut flavored?One Bar. It had been about three months since she last had them (the time she’d been working with me). With her newfound, adjusted taste buds they?did not?hold up at all for her! What once used to be like “candy” had lost all its pizazz and enjoyable flavor.

So, let’s investigate these?One Bars?and see what we’re working with!

A?maple glazed donut flavored?One Bar’s label says we’re getting 20g of protein which is a great start! But we also have 23 grams of carbs, which is more than we’d like but we need to see where the carbs are coming from. We see 3g of fiber (not a lot), 1g of sugar and 5g of sugar alcohols…something doesn’t totally add up here to get to that carb count. We can’t account for all 23g but either way, with a net carb count of 15g, this bar isn’t winning me over. Looking at the fat, it has 8g of fat, 6 of them from saturated fat; again, I think we can do better.

So, how about the ingredients? Most of the?One Bars’?flavors seem to be using a protein blend composed of milk protein isolate and whey protein isolate. There’s also isomalto-oligosaccharides, a fun word for starchy vegetables and likely where the fiber comes from, but I wish it was telling us more. Vegetable glycerin and vegetable oil blend (which are just palm and palm kernel oil) are the sources of fat. We can?definitely?do better here! There’s also polydextrose maltitol, sunflower seed butter, natural flavors, maltodextrin, soy lecithin, sea-salt, nonfat dry milk, whey protein concentrate, sunflower oil, tapioca starch, distilled monoglycerides, and sucralose calcium carbonate. In all, none of these are my favorite, and frankly just?a lot?of ingredients!

Depending on which flavor of?One Bars?you’re having, like the?birthday cake?kind, the ingredient lists have even more included for the sake of flavorings and colors. But a lot of this stuff just does not offer us any nutritional value, even with the amount of protein. Additionally, depending on how sensitive you are to certain foods, a lot of these oils can be considered inflammatory or gut-reactionary.

Let’s jump back to my old client’s email to wrap this all up…I see it over and over and yet, it made me laugh how her tolerance for the artificially sweet bar changed during her time with me. This goes to show that we can retrain our taste buds, allowing us to upgrade from the over-processed foods we call our favorites, and evolve to support better nutrition choices and health!

Are you a fan of?One Bars? Have you noticed foods tasting differently to you after shifting your habits? Let me know all your thoughts in the comments below.