The Good: Very healthy.
The Bad: Tastes terrible, Comparatively expensive,
The Basics: The Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars my wife picked up from the Atkins Advantage brand are almost enough to get me to swear off all health foods . . . or a healthy lifestyle!
My wife has been pretty awesome about getting in healthy foods in order to try to keep me alive longer (nothing impending, she just wants another fifty years with me and figures I need to start working on that now!). But even her acts of kindness with trying to keep me focused on eating better cannot let me let up on bad health food. So, when my wife got in the Atkins Advantage Chocolate Peanut Butter bars, I was tempted to go light on them because my wife got them for us.
But these are gross. Just gross. I don’t care how healthy they are, they are unpleasant to eat.
Basics
Atkins Advantage is the company that merchandises for the diet plan or lifestyle change Atkins Diet. I know little about that and am not on the Atkins diet. I do know that it appears to be gross-tasting and comparatively expensive for the plan.
The Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars come in a 2.1 oz. chocolate bar that is foil-wrapped. Each bar represents a single serving and Atkins Advantage has bars presented as 1” wide by 5” long solid, smooth chocolate bars. One bar is one portion, so this is very easy to get into on the portion front!
Ease Of Preparation
Eating Atkins Advantage Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars is not a real challenge. After removing the wrapper, simply pull out the bar and stick it in your mouth. There is no particularly complicated equation to eating this chocolate-like bar. This is an entirely ready-to-eat food!
Taste
The Atkins Advantage Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars smell like chocolate, at least the mass-produced somewhat sweet chocolate one might expect from a more healthy snack. In the case of the Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars, this smells bolder and less sweet than a mass-produced candy bar. The hint of peanuts in the aroma might contribute to the somewhat salty underscent of the bar.
Biting into the bar, I was surprised by how chewy the bar war. Not at all like a granola bar or even a candy bar, this was more like biting into peanut butter coated with chocolate; it was so soft I was shocked it held its form. The chocolate flavor was incredibly mild and not at all sweet. It was almost entirely overwhelmed by the peanut butter middle. As soon as the center of the Peanut Butter Bar hit my tongue, I was more surprised by the texture than the taste. The texture was soft, but grainy and the taste . . . the taste was dry without being salty. There was no nutty flavor to this, nothing particularly buttery to remind one of peanut butter. This tasted like a health bar, which it is, but it tasted far more mealy than flavorful and it left my mouth dry and gross-feeling.
The best I had was that this tasted like seeds, ground into a paste and coated with the thinnest membrane of the weakest chocolate I recall having.
Nutrition
Atkins Advantages Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars are intended as a snack, but I can’t recommend them even for that! These 2.1 oz. Bars represent a single serving and they have a boatload of nutrients in them. Made primarily of protein blend, glycerin and polydextrose, there are a lot of unpronounceable items in the ingredients and reading the ingredients goes a long way to explaining the taste! This is not an all-natural food product and these Bars were produced on equipment that forces them to add a disclaimer about peanuts, nuts and seeds.
In addition to ingredients I cannot readily pronounce, Atkins Advantage's Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars have 240 calories, 110 of which are from fat. A full serving represents 30% of one's RDA of saturated fat and 1% of the RDA of cholesterol. They are not low in sodium, as they possess 220 mg per serving, though they are almost redeemed by having a whopping19 grams of protein. There is a pretty extensive list of nutrients these bars have, so they are basically a vitamin pill in chocolate bar form. The highlights might well be the 30% Calcium and 20% Phosphorus they possess. Despite the taste, these are ridiculously healthy.
Storage/Cleanup
Atkins Advantage Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars are fine gross regardless of when they are eaten or how they are stored. Regardless, unopened, they ought to last about a year. My wife received these in mid-January of 2012 and they have an expiration date of December 2012, so they do have a decent shelf life. If they melt, they will stain, so consult your fabric guide if that happens. Otherwise, cleanup is simply throwing the foil wrapper away when you are done with the chocolate bar.
Overall
Atkins Advantage Peanut Butter Bars are gross tasting and I hate to think of what the one I ate for review is doing to my body on the way through. I can, however, honestly say that I have been drinking water pretty steadily since I ate one bar, four hours ago! These are not worth buying or stocking up on, no matter what health problems you might be having!
For other reviews of healthy foods, please check out:
Bolthouse Farms Perfectly Protein Mocha Cappuccino drink
Peeled Organic Apricot-a-lot
Ocean Spray Pomegranate Craisins
2.5/10
For other food and drink reviews, please visit my index page on the subject! That is available by clicking here!
© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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