I have a bone to pick with Clif Bars

May 14, 2014
Clif Bar nutrition label
Clif Bar nutrition label

In case you haven’t heard of them, they’re fairly popular energy bars (amongst people who consume energy bars.) Their claim to fame is that they’re made with “70% Organic Ingredients.” I was traveling a few weeks back and on the way home my host kindly offered to provide me with some snacks for the trip home. I had never tried a Clif Bar before and appreciated the opportunity to test one out.

This post isn’t about the merits of the bars themselves. I don’t typically eat this type of product, so I have limited basis on which to make a comparison. I can say that if you’re looking for a quick between-meal snack, at 250 calories a bar, they’ve got far more calories than a reasonable snack should offer. (A more appropriate range would be 100-180 calories.) Plus, they are quite sweet, which should be no surprise since brown rice syrup was the first item on the ingredients list.

No, my problem is with their Nutrition Information table. I have no problem with the fact that the list of vitamins and minerals they include is a mile long – anything beyond Vitamins A, C, calcium, and iron are voluntary – and it’s no lie to include everything that’s there, even though some may be present in such small quantity as to be negligible. Companies realize that not everyone is going to actually read the nutrition facts; a good number will simply glance at the lengthy list and believe that they are buying something especially nutritious. That’s (technically) a legitimate advertising technique.

For those of us who do read the table, however, it’s a whole other story. The makers of Clif Energy Bars go out of their way to make it as hard as possible to judge the nutritional value of their product. I’m a registered dietitian who has spent years in school working with Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) and Recommended Daily Intakes (RDIs), and I still had to spend an hour looking up whether each of the nutrients had a good amount or an insignificant amount in the bar!

How confusing is it? Let me count the ways:

1. Uses absolute numbers instead of percent

Do you walk around with the knowledge that the recommendation for riboflavin is 1.7mg, or for biotin it’s 300 µg? Despite my background, even I don’t have them all memorized. In Canada and the US we have something called the “% Daily Value” on our nutrition labels. The Daily Value is an amount that, for the given nutrient, should meet the needs of 98% of the population. The Percent Daily Value then allows us to, at a glance, determine if there is a little of a nutrient in the food, or a lot of it. Pretty straightforward, eh?

So when Clif Bar & Company decides to tell us that there are 0.35mg thiamine and 50mg magnesium, I get a little annoyed. Do they expect us to start carrying around reference guides with us to the supermarket?

2. Use mg as the unit of measurement for almost everything.

At least if they’d used the same unit of measurement for everything, I’d have to award them some points for consistency. No such luck. Everything is in mg, except for Vitamin A and niacin. Actually, their choices of units are so bad, that the bulk of my issues lie right here.

2a. Use of mg where other units are standard

There are some nutrients, like Vitamins D and E, for which you’ll never find them expressed in mg. There are different forms of each vitamin, with differing biological activity; the differing forms are measured in something called International Units (IU), so no matter which form of the vitamin you’re getting, you know that it is just as biologically active as another form with the same measurement. So 2.5mg of Vit E means nothing unless you know what kind of vitamin E you’re getting, and if it’s a nutritionally significant form or not.

2b. Use of RE for Vitamin A

This one is a little more complicated, but no less annoying. Vitamin A, like Vitamins D & E, also comes in different forms with different amounts of biological activity. For a long time, International Units (IU) were the standard, with each compound measured and expressed in IU.  I won’t get into the details, but powers that be decided that IUs weren’t as accurate as they had originally thought, so they came up with an alternative conversion system, providing it with the name RE (Retinol Equivalents) instead. Then those, too, were deemed to be inaccurate, and the most recent system of conversions is referred to as RAE (Retinol Activity Equivalents), and RE was retired. The US FDA (Food & Drug Administration) continues to use 5000IU as the Daily Value for Vitamin A, but that is likely to change soon to RAE. (Health Canada currently uses RAE.)

So, what this means is, nobody uses RE anymore. Really. Just Cliff Bar & Company.

2c. Uses NE for niacin

Okay, technically they’re on the right side of this one. There’s movement from mg to NE (Niacin Equivalents), but as with RAE, the change is in progress, and most people have not yet made the switch. The Daily Value (which is the most common reference point for us) has not been converted to NE as yet, so again, the information is not as useful as it could be.

2d. Uses mg when µg makes more sense.

I like numbers, so I’ll admit that once in a while can be surprised at how uncomfortable some individuals can be when it comes to doing some simple math. This time, however, even I couldn’t be surprised. Take a look at the amount of Vitamin B 12 in a bar: 0.00025mg. Are we really expected to read that as 25 ten-thousandths of a milligram? Considering the DV is 6.0 µg, wouldn’t it make more sense to represent it as 0.25 µg in a serving? Just sayin’.

That’s my rant. If you’re interested in actually figuring out how nutritious this Clif Bar really is, here’s what the nutrition facts should say:Clif Bar nutrition

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