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Are Balance Bars Healthy?

This site contains information on many types of Zone perfect bars, Balance bars or similar lines of nutrition meal replacement diet bars.

The question of whether or not Balance bars are healthy or not is, like so many things, relative.

I mean, ideally we'd all eat meals and snacks that are all perfectly balanced between protein, carbohydrates and fat to keep us in the Zone twenty-four hours a day. All the foods would consist of organic fruits, vegetables and nuts, and beef and milk from grass-fed cows, chicken and eggs from chickens allowed to wander and eat highly nutritious seeds, and fish from streams, lakes and oceans without a trace of pesticides.

Oh, and we'd all also eat plenty of green superfoods from chorella, blue-green algae, and seaweed.

Everything would be cooked to preserve its natural nutrition, though most fruits and vegetables would be eaten raw.

We wouldn't gorge on this delicious food, we'd eat just enough.

And we'd get a moderate amount of exercise in a moderate amount of sunlight (no days of continuous rain).

If you live in such a healthy paradise, then you probably do think that Balance bars are terrible because not every ingredient is perfectly natural and organic. And you wouldn't need them.

But for those of us who must live in the real world outside of this hypothetical food and health paradise that doesn't exist, sometimes we are hungry and there's no practical way to stay in the Zone without eating a meal bar (or two).

I would prefer all organic ingredients but, let's face it, if you eat a plateful of spaghetti made out of whole wheat, organic flour, it's still a strain on your pancreas to produce all that insulin, and it will still contribute to making you fat and producing silent inflammation and all the other bad things caused by eating an excess of carbohydrates.

That's it's all organic is not very important in the big scheme of things. Yes, better spaghetti made from organically grown wheat than the commercial stuff, but it's all too much sugar, too high of a glycemic load for optimum health.

Reminds me of one of my former co-workers. She asked me once what I'd done to lose so much weight. When I explained briefly about the Zone diet, she said she couldn't give up her whole wheat bread. She's a surviving hippie type. She seemed to be in basically good health (so far as I know), but was also overweight. Not grossly so, but not her optimum weight either, just the creeping pounds of middle age produced by eating too many carbohydrates, staying out of the Zone.

If I could afford to, I'd eat only the Zone bars available from Dr. Barry Sears. Unfortunately, they're a lot more expensive than the commercial brand of Balance bars, especially when discounted by Wal-Mart or Amazon.

So I'd advise anyone concerned about their weight to first of all eat snacks and meals made from the best foods available -- lean meat, nuts, fruits and vegetables following what Dr. Barry Sears.

However, if you understand the Zone concepts, you'll see that Balance bars are healthy if your alternative is to eat too many carbohydrates and leave the Zone.