Fit Fare

While I’d love you to think that I only ever eat tasty little snacks and concoctions that I’ve cooked up myself, this wouldn’t be true. With busy schedules and an intensive workout plan, I often have to rely on store-bought packaged snacks. This doesn’t mean that I’m any more likely to just settle for whatever Power bar happens to cross my path. No, I have very specific requirements and flavor preferences that guide my snack bar choices.

There are three things I look for in a snack bar.

1. Most importantly, I look for bars that contain as close to real food as possible: recognizable ingredients, as organic as possible, better choices of sweeteners…
2. Texture is also important, but I’ve like a range from crunchy to crispy or chewy.
3. Taste is probably my second most important criterion - that’s when I get just plain picky: I don’t like apple flavours in these situation. I tend not to like chocolate flavoured bars (chips are ok, cocoa mixed into the bar base, not so much).

While Clif bars tend to satisfy the ingredients requirement, it doesn’t do so well for me on the latter two. Clif’s Nectar bars are a much better choice for me, but then, I only really like two of the flavors. Clif Mojo bars are great for when I’m craving a bit of salt. And I recently discovered Hammer bars, but they only make one flavour that I like - Almond Raisin. Now, I do sometimes make my own bars, and can choose exactly what goes into them and what combinations, but sometimes you just can’t deny the practicality of prewrapped snack bars.

Enter YouBars. Their motto is “You choose the ingredients, You name the bar, You enjoy it.” Started by a mother-son team of athletes. You bar allows you to design bars with exactly what you want in them, chosen from a pretty good array of ingredients that even include organic options. What more could I ask for!

As soon as I heard about the bars, I headed over to their site and designed a bar for myself and had my husband design one to his taste. The website is a bit basic at this point, but from what I understand, it is currently being rehauled. Here’s how it works:

• First, you choose your base. This is the stuff that hold the thing together, and can often be a nut butter. Actually, the only non-nut butter base is dates. You can select up to two bases out of seven choices. You can then specify if you want it to be organic, raw, salty or crunchy in the special requests.
• Next is your protein powder: this is particularly interesting to me, because many bars use soy protein, but I’ve been trying to steer away from that lately. The other options are whey (ie milk) protein, which is also high in calcium or egg white protein. You can also choose to make a bar without a protein supplement.
• You then get to go on and choose your nuts and dried fruits - two separate categories, up to two selections in each.
• Next is the choice of sweetener. Your options are Clover Honey, Organic Molasses or Organic Brown Rice Syrup but you can also specify if you want the bar to be very sweet or less sweet.
• Seasonings lets you choose up to four additions, including cocoa powder, carob powder, cinnamon and other spices.
• Grains is where you determine your bar’s texture: If you choose Organic Oat Bran, your bar will be chewy and high in fiber. Granola will make it crunchier and Nutty Rice Cereal will make it crispy.
• Finally, you can choose an “inFUsion” - the choices here include Vita-min, Protein, Fiber or Femme.

Unfortunately, they don’t explain on the site what these infusions are so I emailed YouBar support to ask about this. I promptly received a response from Anthony, the owner. Here’s what he said:

“We apologize that you were not able to learn more about our In-Fu-Sions from our website, we are currently working on a new (and improved) website that will list what all of the in-Fu-sions are. Until then, we have our In-Fu-Sions list below:

Our protein infusion is an extra few grams of the protein you selected earlier in the “protein powders” section.

Our Vita-Min In-Fu-Sion is http://www.all-one.com/en/rice.php

Our Femme in-Fu-Sion is http://www.all-one.com/en/calcium.php

Our Fiber in-Fu-Sion is just 1 to 2 grams of Psyllium Husks in each bar.”

I was very excited by the wide range of options and couldn’t wait to taste our new bars. They arrived a week later, with two free sample bars of Honey Cashew. Here’s what we got:

The Ethan Way bar included a base of organic cashew and sesame butter, organic brown rice syrup, dried bananas, organic dried apples, organic walnuts, cocoa, Ghirardelli Semisweet chocolate chips, organic granola oat bran. This yielded a 220 calorie bar with 13g of fat, 2.5 of which are saturated, 23g of carbs, 4g of fiber and 5g of protein.

I thought it was tasty but as it included cocoa powder in the base, it wasn’t so much to my liking. The bar is pretty small, about the size of a Luna bar. It packed a good punch though, at 220 calories. The texture was OK, albeit a bit crumbly (which is to be expected, I guess, due to the lack of preservatives or other additives?). Ethan liked the flavour but did not like the crumbly texture.

The Sara is a Nutty Tart bar included a base of organic dates and almond butter with organic brown rice syrup as sweetener, prunes, walnuts dried cherries and oatbran and a whey protein supplement. This bar was 190 calories, with 7g of fat (0.5g of saturated), 28g of carbs with 2g of fiber and 7g of protein.

Not shockingly, this bar was a lot more my type of bar. The flavors were very tasty and while it still was a bit on the crumbly side, it seemed a bit less crumbly than the other.

The best part of all is that each bar come with nutritional information and ingredient lists on the back! You can see the exact breakdown of what it is you made. Now all of this comes with a price, of course. The bars come in boxes of twelve and cost $3.33 per bar (that’s $40 per box). Add shipping to that, and they’re $3.79 a bar. This is a bit hefty if you’re used to getting your snack bars for around $2.00. On the other hand, if you have food allergies, are a vegan or have some other dietary restrictions, the ability to hand pick your ingredients may well be worth the extra price.

For me, I did enjoy this experience and I’ll probably order from You Bars again, but not exclusively… Just on occasion, to add their bars into my snack bar rotation. I really do enjoy having variety in my choices.