Apples and bananas aside, many of the most convenient grab-and-go foods make for very unhealthy snacks.
This is especially true with snack and cereal bars.
I eat about one granola bar a day because they're so easy to carry around when I'm feeling peckish.
As a highly processed food, however, snack bars have a lot of ingredients, one of which is almost always sugar.
Dietary guidelines say that we should eat fewer than 50 grams of sugar per day. You don't want to waste up to a third of that on one bar.
We ranked some popular brands from those with the most sugar per serving to those with the least. We didn't account for other nutritional variations, like protein and fiber content. See how your favorite snack, cereal, or granola bar stacks up:
Honey Nut Cheerios: 16 g
Quaker Big Chewy: 12 g sugar, 1 g sugar alcohol
Sugar alcohols are usually processed from naturally occurring sugars in fruits and berries. They taste sweet, but have fewer calories than sugar and usually pass through undigested.
Quaker Breakfast Flats: 12 g
Nature Valley Crunchy: 11 or 12 g
Nutri Grain: 11 g
Nutri Grain Fruit & Nut: 11 g
Fiber One: 10 g
Quaker Quinoa: 9 g sugar, 2 g sugar alcohol
Nature Valley Soft-Baked Oatmeal Squares: 9 g
Kashi Soft Baked: 9 g
Cascadian Farm: 9 g
Special K Nourish: 9 g
Chewy Thin Mints: 8 g sugar, 1 g sugar alcohol
Nature Valley Sweet & Salty Nut: 8 g
Special K Red Berries: 8 g
Quaker Chewy 90 Calorie: 7 g sugar, 1 g sugar alcohol
Kind Healthy Grains: 7 g
Kashi Layered Granola Bars: 7 g
Nature Valley Nut Crisp: 6 g
Nature Valley Trail Mix: 6 g
Quaker Chewy 25% Less Sugar: 5 g sugar, less than 1 g or 1 g sugar alcohol
Fiber One 90 Calorie: 5 g
Kashi Chewy Granola Bars: 5 g
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