ENERGY BARS

Can food created in the laboratory really do you any more good than snacks bought at the sweet shop?

Choosing what energy bars you take out on your rides can be like stepping into a minefield of information. More often than not it ends up being a case of picking up whatever your local bike shop has on offer, regardless of quality or performance. If, however, you have the time to make an informed choice, trying to make sense of all the extravagant claims and bewildering ingredient lists can leave you reeling.

With so many bars being bought, bitten and subsequently binned, we got Cycling Plus’s regular nutritionist Will Girling to look in detail at the ingredients of a range of bars and tell us which ones are best and what sort of riding they’re most suited to.

Will looked into the nutritional breakdown of each bar to see which would deliver the biggest performance boost and help to keep you going on an all-day ride. He also considered all the ingredients and any additives they contain, looking at why they might be there, and whether there was anything in them that might upset guts sensitive to certain substances.

And when all of that was done, the rest of us in the office got stuck in to find out which of the 12 bars on test we actually enjoyed eating!

In the interests of giving ‘real’ food a chance, we also got Will to run the rule over a few of our favourite non-specific energy boosters, from malt loaf to Mars bars and jam sandwiches, to see how they stack up against the best ‘performance nutrition’ the industry has to offer.

The prices featured are the individual price per bar, where applicable, or the unit price of the smallest available quantity where bars are only sold in boxes.