hey it's karena your virtual health coach and I wanted to make a little video today about snack bars now there are a lot of different little snack bars and protein bars on the market so just want to give you a little crash course and how to choose a nutritious snack bar thank you so much for watching let's get started so this video is sponsored in part by the Santa Barbara bar and I really appreciate that they sent us a huge variety of flavors and bars so that our Fitness presenters can enjoy them while they're in the middle of shooting fitness videos so the reason that I accepted Santa Barbara bar as a sponsor is because as you're about to see these are definitely a much more nutritious snack than a lot of these really common snack bars that I will be comparing them to and I also have a couple of other items here to give you a point of reference so let's start by meeting the players we've got the Santa Barbara bar I'm doing the coconut almond for my comparison then we've got this protein plus power bar a strawberry nutrigrain bar and this Nature Valley crunchy granola bar now the first objective for choosing a nutritious snack is choosing something with as many nutrients as possible and we're going to start by looking at the macronutrients so I actually made this little chart here comparing our different bars and we'll just take some little aisle by aisle so let's start with protein we know that we need protein in order to satisfy our hunger and serve the whole purpose of a snack right so Santa Barbara bar eight grams of protein almost two to four times as much protein as the Nature Valley and nutrigrain bars the only one that can compete is the power bar but a little later I'm going to talk about why the processed whey protein that they pack into bars like these is actually not doing you any favors and not giving the nutrients you need in order for your body to really use that protein the way that it's supposed to next up I'd listed the fiber although that's not super important however you do need to have some dietary fiber and if you are eating something that's mostly made of natural foods then that fiber content is already going to be there then we move over to sugar and carbohydrates which we know we want to try and reduce in order to have a nutritious snack so here you can just see that sugar and carbs wise the Santa Barbara Barr is our lowest value just across the board then when we get over into fat one of the most easily confused and I think just demonized part of our diet is the fat what you need to understand is that fats are not only the cleanest energy source for the body they're also the slowest to break down and metabolize so they'll actually give you a longer amount of energy because those fat molecules are not broken down as quickly as sugar the other thing to remember is that healthy fats are really good for you and really important for you so you don't want to be alarmed by the high fat content on the Santa Barbara bar because when we get into the ingredients a little bit you'll see that these are super healthy fats that you do want to have in your diet and that make a great snack because they fill you up so the second item on our checklist of things to look for is as many nutrients as possible this time talking about micronutrients so that is vitamins minerals antioxidants enzymes all of the items that don't usually show up on the actual Nutrition Facts label but are equally if not more important to consider so the best way to get a high nutrient content is to eat nutrient-dense foods so those are your fruits your vegetables and just your natural minimally processed foods in general another great way to supercharge your micronutrients is superfoods and that was one of the things that really attracted me to the Santa Barbara bar eat of the five flavors of these Santa Barbara bars contains various superfoods things like chia seeds pumpkin seeds sunflower and sesame seeds and the inclusion of these little nutrient-dense foods is a really great way to know that you're getting a lot of micro nutrients so another thing I love is that when you actually look at the bars themselves you can literally see all the little chia seeds sunflower seeds and other real food ingredients inside the bars the third thing on our checklist is sugar content so there is the amount of sugar but then there's also the type of sugar and there's a big difference whether a sugar is the naturally found sugar in something like a banana or whether it is the processed sugar that we find in most of our candies or high fructose corn syrup and stuff like that so first just considering a mouth of sugar remember that the Santa Barbara bar was pretty comparable with the other bars actually has lower sugar than the other bars we look back so just looking at amounts of sugar we can see that the Santa Barbara Barr has about half the sugar of a banana almonds are there for a comparison on fat we'll get to that in a second and this reasons down here and this big cup Reese's has about twice as much sugar now just for a point of reference that 20 ounce coca-cola has 65 grams of sugar so about three times as much sugar in that 20 ounce coke as you would get in one of these Santa Barbara bars so in terms of sugar and snacking remember that you got to stay away from high amounts of sugar because they're going to give you a sugar rush but they're also going to give you a sugar crash not to mention it's really unhealthy for you to have lots and lots of sugar so one of the biggest things I love about these bars is that they're really really tasty and delicious there are some other bars out there that probably have less sugar than this but this is the tastiest snack bar that I have sound like this and again with all of those superfoods packed in you know you're getting something really nutrient so I feel like a little bit of sugar that makes it taste amazing is worth it I don't for on the checklist is to avoid Franken foods and what I mean is just avoiding those highly processed foods and trying to opt for things that are natural or as close to natural foods as they can be one thing you can ask yourself is was this thing I'm about to eat made in a kitchen or was it made in a factory because when foods are highly processed like your Reese's Cups and your sodas and your power bars they go through a lot of processing so literally these ingredients are inside of big machineries and one of the biggest problems is that foods which are highly processed go through a lot of this manufacturing tend to be contaminated with heavy metals and they've actually found that several of the different protein powders on the market are indeed contaminated with heavy metals so that is the main reason that I recommend you avoiding those kind of processed food protein bars and I would include protein powders and the mix so even though I don't know for a fact that this particular bar is contaminated with heavy metals I just know that the more processed the ingredients are the more likelihood there is that these ingredients are contaminated not to mention the more that you process a food out of its natural state more it loses the nutritional benefits that we want to get from eating it so as much as you can opt for things which are minimally processed and as close to their natural state as possible it's going to be a really good step in the right direction so just for a little frame of reference on that I just want to take a quick look at the power bar ingredient list now it would take me a whole other video to actually sit down and go through each of these ingredients but you should be able to kind of glance at an agreed e n't list like this and know that this is a highly processed product especially when you see things like soy protein isolate whey protein I so late nonfat milk natural flavor these are all indicators of a highly processed product similarly if we take a quick glance at the nutrigrain bar ingredient list we see the same thing highly processed frankenfoods all right so we've got guar gum and carrageenan and these are fillers they're not even real foods artificial colors like red for tea and just in general you need to understand that when you eat these processed foods many of them also contain MSG or hidden names of MSG which a lot of protein powders also contain may also contain genetically modified ingredients or GMOs which again is maybe a whole other topic for another video but one of the things I love about the Santa Barbara bars is that they're actually non-gmo certified and it even says so right on the label so that's just another really big indication to me that this is a good nutritious snack so in closing I just want to show you these Santa Barbara bars and a little bit more detail I do have a 15% off coupon code for you on top of the discounts that they already offer so if you order them in bulk they offer all of these great discounts lots of awesome flavors peanut chocolate cherry dark chocolate almond Karen berry white chocolate mango lemon and coconut almond and I'll be honest I think that the coconut almond is actually my favorite you know I love chocolate but I was amazed at how delicious the coconut almond was which is awesome so thought it would be like the plain one this is actually really really good so we've had these bars on the set while we're filming fitness and yoga videos and everyone who's tried them has just loved them so I hope you'll consider giving them a try if you do be sure to let me know if you like them again we've got that coupon code below I really want to thank Santa Barbara one last time for sponsoring this video and sending us all of these delicious bars thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed this video and you'll come back and see me again soon