"balance bar" news and stories

Let's face it, all you food-loving, regular meal-eating types reading this site, you are the lucky ones. Most of you are blessed with a stove, maybe some ingredients in your cabinet, a bottle of wine half drunk atop your fridge. But if you're a city guy like me, always on the hustle for a dollar, always one dime short of a cup of coffee, always standing out in the rain in front of a hot food story, watching through rainy windows, then it's all about how to stay full and focused on the street, to not pass out while racing from one job interview to another, how to keep your nutrition at a full gallop while never actually sitting down. 

So God created the food bar! 

I'm sure to the average foodie these things are pox, a blight on nutrition and the gourmand's worst nightmare, but to us who dreamt as children of a future where we could eat candy bars for dinner, the nutrients in chocolate-flavored soy logs, are our life's blood; they keep our blood full of something other than caffeine and nicotine and urban despair. Trapped like jungle rats in a maze of dead-eyed salesman and bloodthirsty wall-streeters on their way to steakhouses and unemployment lines, we duck into the 42nd street bodega and grab our fix to go.

Here are some of the personal favorites:

Snack bars are the new granola bars. This isn’t really a news flash, but I certainly never thought of them this way. They were, by and large, previously marketed as energy bars, designed to deliver an extra dose of calories to hard-working athletes or as meal replacements for busy people. Many people don’t use these as meal replacements, though, and eat two or three a day as snacks, hence the new "snack bar" designation. Though most of the bars have 200-250 calories and less than 6 grams of fat, some can have more than 10 grams of fat and over 300 calories. Eating two or three of these adds up – and quickly.

This month, EatingWell magazine rounded up some of the best snack bar options, based on the following criteria: 225 calories or less and less than 3 grams of saturated fat, as well as at least 5 grams of protein and 3 grams of fiber. The goal was to find something worth eating nutritionally as a snack and was filling enough to hold you over until your next meal.