Written by Catherine Saxeby and Megan Cameron-Lee
on Wednesday, 07 October 2015.
Tagged: food trends, healthy eating, healthy weight loss, nutrition, review, sugar, sugar substitutes
Lately my social media feeds have been flooded with photos of ‘sugar-free’ sweet treats. Made popular by celebrity, Sarah Wilson, and her book ‘I Quit Sugar’, these recipes fill the hole left by traditional, sugar-containing sweets, chocolates, muffins and slices. Are they actually any better?
Catherine and I decided to make up the ‘Healthy Bounty Bar' recipe from the I Quit Sugar website and compare it to the commercial version. You may be surprised at what we found…
Here’s the recipe for the no-sugar Bounty Bar that is meant to be a ‘healthier’ alternative to the commercial one. You can view the original post here.
1 cup coconut milk
2 cups desiccated coconut
Pinch of sea salt
1 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup raw cacao powder
2 tablespoon rice malt syrup
Pinch of sea salt
This alternative version or the 'Sugarefree Bounty Bar' has a filling of desiccated coconut/coconut milk/coconut oil, coated with a cacao and coconut oil ‘chocolate’ which has been sweetened with rice malt syrup. It wasn’t the easiest recipe to make, requiring a lot of forethought and patience with several hours of chilling and freezing between steps.
We photographed, tasted tested and nutritionally analysed both this recipe and the commercial Mars Bounty Bar made by Mars Confectionery. Here’s how they stacked up side-by-side:
We ended up with 24 portions of the Sugarfree Bounty Bar, each of which weighed around 41 grams, according to the analysis. We felt this was a more realistic size and lined up neatly with ONE bar from a typical twin-pack that you buy at a train station (45 g twin pack which holds two, so 22.5 g each). The original recipe suggests ‘36 small bite-sized ones’ which we think are too small. This is because the Sugarfree Bounty Bar is simply more dense (heavier) than the commercial bar, which has an aerated coconut centre, so it goes further.
We were pleasantly surprised with the look of the ‘Healthy Bounty Bar’, particularly the dark chocolate colour and the moist centre. However, this initial promise of delight was let down once we bit into it. Most kindly described as ‘neutral’ in flavour, there was no standout coconut or chocolate flavour and it certainly had nowhere near the sweetness that you would expect from a Bounty Bar.
It was rich, due to the large amount of coconut oil used (a whole jar for the recipe!), but strangely, not satisfying. The commercial bar, on the other hand, was very sweet and ‘coconutty’, but the milk chocolate coating looked disappointing next to the richness of the ‘healthy’ bar. It nonetheless satisfied that sweet craving.
Sugar, desiccated coconut, glucose syrup, milk solids, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, invert sugar, vegetable fat, emulsifiers (471, soy lecithin), humectant (glycerol), salt, natural flavour (vanilla extract), peanuts.
Coconut oil, coconut milk, desiccated coconut, rice malt syrup, cacao powder, sea salt.
The ‘healthy’ bar has:
Per Serve | Per 100 g | |||
Component |
'Sugar-free' |
Commercial 22.5 g |
'Sugar-free' |
Commercial |
Energy kJ | 890 | 456 | 2162 | 2020 |
Cal | 212 | 109 | 517 | 483 |
Protein, g | 1.2 | 0.7 | 2.8 | 3.1 |
Fat Total, g | 21.2 | 5.8 | 51.5 | 25.6 |
Saturated, g | 19.3 | 4.5 | 46.9 | 19.8 |
Carbohydrate, g | 6.0 | 13.0 | 14.6 | 57.7 |
Sugars, g | 4.7 | 10.0 | 11.5 | 45.8 |
Dietary Fibre, g | 1.9 | NA | 4.5 | NA |
Sodium, mg | 38 | 21 | 94 | 95 |
Analysis for the ‘Sugar free’ bars was done using Foodworks V7 and the figures for the commercial bars were taken from the back of a 45 g twin-pack Mars Bounty Bar.
The ‘Sugarfree’ version:
In order to make their ‘sugar-free’ recipes palatable, many anti-sugar advocates utilise a non-traditional, fructose-free sweetener (in this case rice malt syrup) and compensate with large amounts of saturated fat (such as the currently fashionable coconut oil).
While the ‘healthy’ version contains less sugar and is much less processed, it’s still not sugar-free, just sucrose-free which is not the same. It is also much too time consuming and expensive for the everyday person. It seems that we humans love sugar so much that even when we supposedly give it up, we look for alternatives to replace it with. Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
My tip: If it’s something sweet you’re after, enjoy ONE small sugar-containing, commercially produced Bounty Bar. But do so mindfully, in small portions, and not very often.
Guest post by Megan Cameron-Lee (BND), APD. Check out Megan's blog at http://thedieteticdegustation.blogspot.com.au.
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