I recently was reading about nutrition and, as a result, decided to increase my protein consumption.  I already eat a lot of animal based food such as beef and chicken, so I was looking for an alternative, and came across this protein bar.  What could be better than getting a huge serving of protein – 50 grams! – in a bar that tastes like a chocolate chip cookie?  50 grams is quite a lot – about double what you might get eating a piece of chicken or steak, and equivalent to eating about 8 eggs.

But as in most things in life, what’s too good to be true is generally not true.  As a general rule, nutritionists believe that the simplest foods are best; which means smallest number of ingredients, least processing. Take a look at the attached image; I count about 35 different ingredients, although the list is so complex its difficult to figure out; some of the ingredients are pretty simple, most are not.

If you just look at the left side of the ingredients list, it looks great;  180 calories is a calorie efficient way of getting 50 grams of protein. 2 grams of sugar is very little.  But the right side sounds more like a chemical lab than a kitchen. Would anything on this list kill me? Probably not.  But the danger is that something like this is meant to be eaten on a very regular basis, like every day.  And it’s the cumulative effects of things I don’t really understand that scare me off something like this, given that my goals are based on making progress over years; in fact, decades.