8 myths about the “healthy” snack aisle

Most of those bars can't legally use the word.

In the UK, under the Cocoa and Chocolate Products Regulations, “chocolate” is a reserved description. You cannot print it unless the product contains at least 35% total dry cocoa solids, including at least 18% cocoa butter.

There is one allowance worth knowing about, because it cuts against me. Up to 5% of certain vegetable fats can go into something still sold as chocolate, as long as it still hits those minimums and the pack carries the words “contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter”. So vegetable fat and the word chocolate can appear together, legally. What can't is a covering made mostly of vegetable fat, which is what most of those bars are using.

Which is why so many chocolate-covered bars don't. Look at one. It shows you a brown bar. It may say “chocolatey,” or “cocoa,” or nothing at all, because the brown layer is made with vegetable fat instead of cocoa butter and using the word would be an offence.

That layer has a name in the trade. It's called compound. It's cheaper, it runs through a factory more easily, and it doesn't melt at body temperature the way cocoa butter does. That melt is most of what makes chocolate feel like chocolate in your mouth.

It survives a bar that has been sweetened throughout.

The claim has a narrow legal test: no added sugars of any kind, and nothing else added to make it sweet. It says nothing about how much sugar is in the food.

And here's the part almost nobody knows. Sugar alcohols are not classed as sugars. Maltitol, erythritol, xylitol and sorbitol are polyols, declared on their own line under carbohydrate. So a bar sweetened almost entirely with them can print “no added sugar” on the front, entirely legally.

Most polyols are only partly absorbed in the small intestine. What's left passes further down, draws in water and ferments, which is where the bloating comes from. Erythritol is absorbed better than the others, but it still carries the same warning. That is established enough to be written into law: any food with more than 10% added polyols has to carry the words “excessive consumption may produce laxative effects.”

The warning is on the pack. It's near the ingredients, in the smallest type on the packaging, while the front says no added sugar in a friendly typeface.

It's a percentage of energy, not a quality standard.

Not a marketing phrase. A defined nutrition claim with a hard threshold: at least 20% of the food's energy must come from protein. Twelve per cent gets you “source of protein.”

That's the whole test. It says nothing about what the protein is, where it came from, or how much processing it took to get into the bar.

Soy protein isolate passes it easily. It's the cheapest complete protein you can buy at scale and it's heavily processed to get there, which is exactly why it turns up in so many budget bars. The number on the front looks the same either way.

The label can't tell you where the fibre came from.

Also a defined claim: 6g of fibre per 100g, or 3g per 100 calories. And the number treats every source identically.

Fibre from dates, flaxseed and chicory root counts. So does polydextrose, which is made in a factory. So does IMO, which is cheap and sweet, so one ingredient can push the fibre number up and sweeten the bar at the same time.

They don't do the same thing once you've eaten them. But the label counts them the same, so the front of the pack can't tell you which one you're getting.

Usually true, and rarely what you assume it means.

The fruit in most snacks arrives as juice concentrate. Concentrating removes the water and, in the process, most of the fibre. Fibre is the thing that made it fruit rather than sugar in the first place.

The government agrees, incidentally. Under the UK definition of free sugars, sugars in fruit juices and concentrates are counted as free sugars, in the same bracket as the sugar you'd spoon into tea. Whole fruit isn't.

What's left after concentrating is a sweetener with a wholesome name and a picture of a strawberry above it.

The fibre isn't incidental, either. It's the thing that decides how fast the sugar arrives. Whole fruit releases its sweetness slowly because the fibre is still in the way. Strip the fibre out and you have a fast sugar with a wholesome label, which is why a snack built on concentrate can lift you for half an hour and leave you flat afterwards. Sweetness that still has its fibre does something different.

A named protein is a decision. A blend is a hiding place.

Every protein has a name. Pea. Whey. Brown rice. Soy. A brand that has chosen carefully will print the name, because the name is the point.

So when a pack says protein blend and won't say what's in it, the reason is rarely that the blend is too impressive to describe. It's usually soy protein isolate, which is the cheapest complete protein you can buy at scale and takes a lot of processing to get there.

It passes every legal test. It counts as protein by any definition. Whether you'd have picked it, if anyone had shown you the choice, is another question. The front of the pack is careful not to ask it.

Not a standard. There's nothing to clear.

Unlike everything above, this isn't a defined claim at all. No threshold, no test, no authority checking it.

It means the ingredients came from plants. It sounds like it means dates and flaxseed. It just as easily means glucose syrup, palm fat, soy protein isolate and polydextrose. All of those started as plants too, and all of them are a very long way from anything you'd cook with.

The same goes for “all natural,” which isn't regulated in the UK, and “real ingredients,” which is meaningless because every food contains real ingredients. The question was always which ones.

That isn't a compliment to the recipe. It's the design.

Look at the shape of what you're buying, not just the composition.

Foods designed to satisfy come in single servings. Foods designed to not quite be enough come in multipacks, sharing bags and “indulgence” boxes. The packet of biscuits is engineered for about four. Even the 70% dark square, the responsible choice, is made to be savoured, not to be stopped after one, which is why the second arrives to balance the bitterness and the third to do it justice.

Most of us file that as a willpower failure. It's a packaging decision, made months earlier, by someone who has never met you.

It would be cheeky to write all that and then ask you to take my word for anything.

I didn't build it to win an argument about ingredients. I built it because I wanted something at three o'clock that tasted like an actual treat and didn't require me to stop being the person who reads the back of things.