Not sure if this entirely fits here, but as a biohacker/QS-er for many years I made BarsPro (barspro.com) for my own benefit and wanted to share.
Energy and protein bars have been a huge part of my diet for years (for better or worse). As much as I love food, sometimes it’s just easier, faster, and healthier to eat an energy bar.
Unfortunately many brands make bars full of sugar/fat/sodium/questionable ingredients, or don’t provide enough protein/fiber/nutrition. One of the most frustrating experiences is staring at a wall of hundreds of bars and having to read through the nutrition facts one-by-one to find something edible.
I manually compiled a list of 700+ bars, their nutrition facts, and ingredients - all to make it easy to quickly find good bars.
Let me know what you think! Hopefully this will be valuable for some.
P.S. None of the content is sponsored (and never will be). This is purely a passion project.
This is awesome, seriously. I’ve found that protein bars have been useful to me in breaking my sugar addiction. When I have a strong craving I’ve been eating a protein bar, and this typically keeps me from eating more junky or high sugar foods and gets me to my next regular meal. But comparing different bars along the various dimensions that matter to me (artificial ingredients, sugar/carb, protein, type of sweetener) is not easy. I’ve already used the table, it’s very complete and well done, a very useful contribution. THANK YOU.
Thanks for the kind words! I’m really glad this is useful.
I want to add a way to filter by sweeteners, since it’s important for me as well. However I haven’t thought of a good way to implement it. Especially given the large number of sweeteners and the fuzzy research data on which sweeteners are more harmful / less harmful.
On a related side note, I’ve found some energy bars have absolutely no impact on my glucose levels (despite having 10g+ of natural sugar). Although the glycemic response seems to vary person-to-person.
Well done, this is a great tool!
In a perfect world, I’d love to be able to search for protein type, e.g., I prefer egg white protein, and to exclude things I definitely don’t want, such as artificial sweeteners and whey.
That would probably require something like an ElasticSearch backend (which is a lot to ask for).
Just one thing that my friend noted: it doesn’t take into account things like grams of polyoles (can cause GI issues) and other “low sugar” sweeteners like maltodextrin, maltitol, sorbitol, etc. (common with “low sugar” bars).
I just made a few updates and performance improvements.
There is now a “Filters” button on top which allows you to specify which ingredients you want to include (e.g. “egg white”) and which you want to exclude (e.g. “artificial sweeteners”, “maltodextrin”, “whey”, etc.)
I’m at the mercy of whatever information each bar provides in the nutrition facts, so anything like a NOVA score is quite difficult to calculate.
The health score is calculated via a (somewhat arbitrary) formula which weighs the nutritional value + the quality of ingredients. After a lot of tweaking it felt right to me but let me know if any scores seem off.
My fear is any sponsorships may put the credibility of the rankings at risk. Although I’d be open to some commission option using referral links. The site doesn’t cost much to operate but it would still be nice to pay the bills somehow.
I am so grateful that we have this space to connect. First, your research has helped me identify the specific protein bar that i will buy in bulk (love good fats). Second, when i saw your response, i did a few google searches and gound a good resource for creating affiliate links.
Third, this information may help you, and I hope it does, but it also will help me greatly when i am ready to monetize some of the product reviews i’ll do when I finish setting up my website.
Great job, once again, and I pray you receive and accept all the blessings that might come to bear from your hard work.