9 Best Healthy Snack Bars | UK Dietitian Reviewed
However, the sad truth is that while many snack bars may seem light and healthy, many of them contain high amounts of sugar and calories which can be detrimental to your health or weight loss goals. To help you out, we'll explain the things to look out for when shopping for a healthy snack bar, and include some yummy recommendations from brands like Kind, RxBar, and Larabar.
Quick List - Top Healthy Snack Bars
Adonis
An Amazing Low-Sugar Snack Bar Made from Natural Ingredients
Nakd
Convenient Wholefood Snacks to Replace Your Chocolate Bar
KIND
An Award-Winning Nut-Packed Bar With Less Sugar
Author of The Bone Strength Plan and a professional, evidenced-based nutritionist in London. Jo has carried out over 1500 hours of one-to-one consultations with more than 600 clients, as well as the additional hours of workshops, research, and media work with the BBC, Channel 4, The Islam channel and more.
A recommendation service that carefully researches each product and consults with experts across many disciplines. We are constantly creating new content to provide the best shopping experience from choosing ‘cosmetics’ to ‘food and drink’, ‘home appliances’ to ‘kids and baby’ products, reaching users all across the United Kingdom.
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Table of Contents
- With Specialist Consultation From Dietitian Jo Travers
- How to Choose a Healthy Snack Bar in the UK – Buying Guide
- A Mid-Exercise Energy Boost or a Morning Snack? Different Snack Bars Have Different Purposes1
- Learn How to Scan the Ingredients Label2
- Look for Bars High in Fibre and Other Nutrients3
- Stick to Natural Ingredients, and the Fewer Ingredients the Better4
- 9 Best Healthy Snack Bars in the UK
- No. 1Adonis | Low Sugar Nut Bar Coconut Vanilla Acai Berry｜Pack of 6
- No. 2Nakd | Cocoa Delight Wholefood Bar ｜Pack of 48
- No. 3Squirrel Sisters | Raw Snack Bars
- No. 4KIND | Maple Glazed Pecan & Sea Salt Bars｜Pack of 12
- No. 5Trek | Protein Nut Bars｜Pack of 16
- 4 more products
- How Often Can You Eat Snack Bars?
With Specialist Consultation From Dietitian Jo Travers
Jo Travers, author of The Bone Strength Plan is a professional, evidenced-based nutritionist in London. She has carried out over 1500 hours of one-to-one consultations with more than 600 clients, as well as the additional hours of workshops, research, and media work with the BBC, Channel 4, The Islam Channel, and more.
You can find her comprehensive catalogue of courses and guides for everything nutrition-related on her website, as well as absolutely delicious recipe ideas on her Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
How to Choose a Healthy Snack Bar in the UK – Buying Guide
There are so many kinds of snack bars with different health benefits that it can be hard to know which is best. Here are some tips for working out which snacks bars are best suited to your needs, and what really makes a snack bar healthy!
A Mid-Exercise Energy Boost or a Morning Snack? Different Snack Bars Have Different Purposes
Different snack bars have various purposes which you should take into consideration. For instance, bars that are high in protein (20 grams or more) are aimed to be eaten after intense exercise, so are perfect for active types.
Energy bars are supposed to be eaten during long periods of exercise, such as a long bike ride or hike. They, therefore, tend to contain more calories, sugar, sodium, and fat than usual snack bars in order to give a boost of energy.
For usual everyday activity, it's fine to have lower amounts of protein (under 20 g). It's also good to look for bars with a low GI (glycemic index), which means it contains carbs that are digested slowly and thus keep you satiated and energised for longer. A good example of this would be a snack bar containing mostly fruits or whole grains.
Nuts are often added for protein and flavour; they are full of good fats and fibre too, as well as micronutrients like selenium, potassium and zinc. Nuts can also lower the glycaemic index of the bar meaning that the carbohydrate gets absorbed more slowly. This can keep you going for longer, but might not be so good straight after a workout when you need to replenish nutrients quickly.
Learn How to Scan the Ingredients Label
An excess of sugar, saturated fat, and sodium can be detrimental to our health, and can increase our risk of various illnesses such as heart disease. Unfortunately, even if a snack bar says that it is healthy, that is not always the case. It is up to you to look at the ingredients and work out how healthy it really is. Here's how!
Pick a Bar Low in Sugar, Ideally From Natural Sources Such as Fruit
Try to choose snack bars with no more than 10 g of sugar, especially added sugar. If a bar has sugars or syrups listed towards the top of the ingredients list, that is a warning sign that it many not be that healthy after all.
On the other hand, if all the sugar naturally comes from fruit, it will not be that bad for you. Let’s say that you are comparing two snack bars with the same amount of sugar in grams. One has mostly fruit in the ingredients, whereas the other has less fruit and some added syrups and sugars.
The sugar in the first bar must have come naturally from the fruit, meaning it is healthier for you than the latter, despite them having the same quantity of sugar.
Picking a bar with fruit in it is good for other reasons too. Dried fruit can also be a good source of iron, especially dried apricots and also raisins. Fruit also contains fibre (added sugar doesn't typically have any) which is good for digestion and feeds the bacteria in the gut microbiome.
Be aware of large amounts of natural sugars like honey and maple syrup because they behave in the body more like table sugar than sugar from whole fruit.
Choose a Low Fat and Low Sodium Bar for a Healthy Body Inside and Out
For everyday activity it is best to find a snack bar with under 3 grams of saturated fat, and no more than 5 grams. If weight loss or maintenance is a goal, keeping an eye on the fat will also ensure your bar isn't too high in calories.
Sodium can also cause various health problems, such as raising your blood pressure, so should be limited to under 140 mg (0.14 g). Many of the most popular snack bars unfortunately have high amounts of sodium, so it's worth factoring them into the rest of your daily salt intake.
Saturated fat in cereal bars often comes from coconut. Although coconut oil is often seen as healthy, it still contains more saturated fat than butter or lard! Having it occasionally isn't a problem, but try to mix things up and choose other bars as well. Sodium is the thing that makes salt taste salty, but it is also a general flavour enhancer and a preservative; even if your cereal bar is sweet, it may still have sodium in it.
Go For Bars With Around 200 Calories Whilst Considering Your Activity Levels
However, if you are eating it to replace a meal, or you have a particularly active lifestyle where you're burning more calories than most, it might be better to consume a bar of over 200 kcal.
A bar that contains more than 200kcal, unless it has a lot of nuts in it, is likely to be high in sugar and therefore less healthy in general. The ingredients towards the front of the list will likely be where most of the calories are coming from so beware if the first ingredient is a sugar! Ideally, you want to see oats or nuts at the top of the list.
Look for Bars High in Fibre and Other Nutrients
Once you have found snack bars low in unhealthy ingredients, you should also make sure that it has plenty of nutritious contents to keep you healthy.
You should look for bars with a high amount of fibre in order to keep you full for longer and maintain healthy digestion. Ideally, the bar will contain at least 3 grams of fibre or 10% of your recommended daily fibre intake. A sign that a snack bar has a high fibre content is if it has a lot of ‘roughage’; for example, lots of fruit, nuts, oats and seeds.
Fibre has lots of benefits in the body but most of us get nowhere near enough on a daily basis. In fact, some studies show that most of us may only get half of what we need. Fibre, as mentioned above, is what feeds the bacteria that live in our gut.
We have a symbiotic relationship with these bacteria: we feed them well and in return, they perform lots of functions like making neurotransmitters and training the immune system. The greater the variety of fibre we eat, the greater the variety of friendly bacteria our gut can support.
Stick to Natural Ingredients, and the Fewer Ingredients the Better
When comparing different snack bars, those with a small amount of whole, real ingredients are healthier than those with a long list of ingredients with fewer natural contents.
It is also important to see where the sugar, fat, sodium, and calories in the bar have come from. This means that when looking for a healthy snack bar, you should look not just at the nutritional information, but look at the ingredients too in order to work out the healthiness of the sugars, fats, and so on.
The healthiest snack bars will contain mostly fruit, nuts, oats and seeds which between them provide sweetness, protein, fibre and good fats. There isn't really any need to add extra fibre or sugar.
Protein bars may have some additional protein powder added but try to choose bars without too many emulsifiers and so on. Another thing to watch out for is bars with less than 100kcal. They are likely to be full of things without many nutrients in them and are unlikely to fill you up!
9 Best Healthy Snack Bars in the UK
Products | Image | Click to purchase | Key features | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Adonis Low Sugar Nut Bar Coconut Vanilla Acai Berry｜Pack of 6 | | An Amazing Low-Sugar Snack Bar Made from Natural Ingredients | |
2 | Nakd Cocoa Delight Wholefood Bar ｜Pack of 48 | | Convenient Wholefood Snacks to Replace Your Chocolate Bar | |
3 | Squirrel Sisters Raw Snack Bars | | Creamy and Delicious Snack With Only 6 Ingredients | |
4 | KIND Maple Glazed Pecan & Sea Salt Bars｜Pack of 12 | | An Award-Winning Nut-Packed Bar With Less Sugar | |
5 | Trek Protein Nut Bars｜Pack of 16 | | Satisfyingly Nutty and High in Filling Fibre and Protein | |
6 | Alpen Light Cherry Bakewell Bar ｜Pack of 10 | | A Light Cereal Bar for Calorie Counters | |
7 | LÄRABAR Peanut Butter Choc Chip Bar | | A Healthy Alternative to Chocolate Chip Cookies | |
8 | The Primal Pantry Paleo Protein Bars｜Pack of 15 | | Vegan, Natural Protein Bars Made Out of All-Raw Ingredients | |
9 | PhD Smart Bar ｜Pack of 12 | | A Low Sugar and High Protein Post-Workout Bar |
Adonis Low Sugar Nut Bar Coconut Vanilla Acai Berry ｜ Pack of 6
An Amazing Low-Sugar Snack Bar Made from Natural Ingredients
The low amount of sugar in this bar means that your blood sugar level will not rise dramatically when you eat it, nor will you get any mid-afternoon energy slumps, either. Nevertheless, the nuts and seeds will give you gradual-release energy, keeping you fuelled and energised for a long time.
Convenient Wholefood Snacks to Replace Your Chocolate Bar
Compared to other snack bars they are a small size (35 g) so are great for putting in bags and eating when on the go. They are packed with a small amount of natural ingredients so will give you lots of energy whenever you need it, whether after the gym or with a cuppa.
Creamy and Delicious Snack With Only 6 Ingredients
Keep in mind that each packet contains 2 x 20 gram bars of 85 calories each, so if you want to cut down on calories even more, why not save one for later or share one with a friend?
KIND Maple Glazed Pecan & Sea Salt Bars ｜ Pack of 12
An Award-Winning Nut-Packed Bar With Less Sugar
Despite the fact that it contains a whopping 73% nuts as well as some potentially off-putting syrups, this KIND bar is a great balance of wholesome and delicious, so can appeal to anyone.
Satisfyingly Nutty and High in Filling Fibre and Protein
The result? A hugely satisfying, toothsome snack bar that keeps you fuller for longer between meals, and feels much naughtier than it really is. They also contain surprisingly low amounts of sugar and fat – just 4.7 and 2 grams respectively. Saintly!
A Light Cereal Bar for Calorie Counters
There's no doubt that at just 65 calories per bar, it's the ideal craving-buster for calorie counters, however, there are added sugar and syrups as well as artificial ingredients and flavourings that may not be so good for your body.
A Healthy Alternative to Chocolate Chip Cookies
However, there is a large amount of sugar, mostly from the fruit, with 3 g of added sugar from the chocolate. There are 210 calories per bar, so these are best as a healthier alternative to a sweet treat, for replacing meals, or to give you energy during or after exercise.
The Primal PantryPaleo Protein Bars ｜ Pack of 15
Vegan, Natural Protein Bars Made Out of All-Raw Ingredients
The Primal Pantry follows the increasingly popular 'paleo' way of eating, and only makes its products out of natural, raw ingredients such as dried fruits, nuts, and seeds. Each bar in this set has 15 g of protein too, thanks to the added hemp protein.
This mixed case contains all 4 varieties so you can find out which one you like best! Though gluten-free, paleo and vegan-friendly, due to the amount of fruit in these bars there is quite a lot of sugar and a relatively high amount of calories – worth bearing in mind if you're not active or trying to lose weight.
A Low Sugar and High Protein Post-Workout Bar
However, these bars have a high amount of calories, salt, and saturated fat, so you should really only have them after you have exercised. There are also few natural ingredients and a low amount of fibre, so they will not give you much nutrition apart from the protein.
How Often Can You Eat Snack Bars?
Typical energy bars should not be a substitute for a regular meal and should ideally only be eaten as a treat or if you are being active, due to the high amounts of fat and sugar. Similarly, protein bars are great for after a workout, but may be a little high in sugar for those who are more sedentary.
Good-quality snack bars or cereal bars are however high in fibre, so are a great healthy snack to have daily if you do not eat enough fruit and veg normally. Just make sure to factor in the nutritional values with the rest of your meals and snacks, and you should be good to go!
Author: Brigid Bernard
Top 5 Healthy Snack Bars
No. 1: Adonis ｜Low Sugar Nut Bar Coconut Vanilla Acai Berry｜Pack of 6
No. 2: Nakd ｜Cocoa Delight Wholefood Bar ｜Pack of 48
No. 3: Squirrel Sisters ｜Raw Snack Bars
No. 4: KIND ｜Maple Glazed Pecan & Sea Salt Bars｜Pack of 12
No. 5: Trek｜Protein Nut Bars｜Pack of 16
View Full RankingThe descriptions of each product are referenced from content available on manufacturer, brand, and e-commerce sites.
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