[paulryanrogers]

I learned that any 'health' bars with 12+ grams of carbs are just candy. Yet all except one was over that limit. The exception was 5g yet had sugar alcohol (artifical sweetener?) putting the real number at 20g.

So maybe those bars are intended as whole meal replacement? If so it's not clear on the labels.

[croon]

I think you're being too charitable. I don't think they have any intention other than to sell bars. I've read the content declaration of every bar I've encountered and have yet to ingest a single one of them.

Just buy a bag of nuts if you want what bars portray themselves to be, but are not.

[mumblemumble]

I have occasionally seen products along these lines that actually are what they claim to be. They never seem to stick around for long.

The problem with making a consumer product that isn't primarily designed to sell is, you tend not to sell very much of it. When it comes to convenience foods - and anything ready-to-eat in a Mylar wrapper is, almost by definition, a convenience food - what most people want to buy is junk food. Not out of some moral failing, I don't think, so much as that, when you're going for convenience foods, you just happen to be working with a part of your brain that's hard-wired to crave junk food. So we tend to go for junk food, and, even when that's not what we think we want, it's ridiculously easy to be taken in by junk food whose Mylar wrapper loudly proclaims that it's actually healthy food.

From there, it's just the law of the jungle. Products that sell better get the shelf space, products that don't sell as well don't. That determines who gets the shelf space, and therefore who gets to survive as a company.

I've also seen this play out at a macro scale in the rise of Whole Foods Market. They devote every bit as much of their shelf space to convenience foods as any other supermarket. Between that and their distressingly ironic name, it's hard for me to feel surprised that I've seen them out-compete a great many beloved stores that were more genuinely focused on selling whole foods over the past quarter century.

[arboghast]

Sugar alcohols are not artificial sweeteners. Some, like erythritol, are a byproduct of fermentation. They usually don't "count" as carbs because they are not fully digested. They act more like fibers.