Granola Bars

As some of you may know, the Smith basketball team is away in Maine playing in the NCAA Tournament! In order to ensure that we are at our peak performance-wise, our coach has provided us with two meals before our game tonight, and is also arranging for us to have ample amounts of pre-game snacks. These snacks will range from fruit, to bread with peanut butter, and most notably a variety of granola bars. 

In my possession, I currently have a myriad of such types of snacks: Nature Valley Fruit & Nut, Nature Valley Oats 'n Honey, Odwalla Sweet & Salty Almond, Cliff Bar Crunch Peanut Butter, and Cliff Bar Oatmeal Raisin Walnut. 

In my own form of an experiment, I decided to sample two of these types of bars: one I am very familiar with, and one that I am not. First was the Nature Valley Fruit & Nut bar, which is owned by General Mills. It was very sweet, at first overwhelmingly so. The bar was very sticky, and initially very hard to chew. I was unable to distinguish between the nuts and the fruit; it all tasted blended (perhaps a tactic to prevent people from becoming sick of the product). 

Next, I tried the Odwalla Sweet & Salty Almond bar. Odwalla is a company I have never heard of before. This bar boasts 24% organic ingredients as well as a pledge that it does not contain ingredients that were produced using biotechnology (promising in light Food Inc.). I was expecting not to be impressed, based on the idea that healthier things usually never taste better. When I first opened the bar I was pleasantly surprised by the almond smell. The bar appeared to be held together by some gunk, just like the Nature Valley. With my first bite, I was met with a pleasant crunch which was absent in the Nature Valley bar, leading me to believe there actually were some real nuts and not just gunk in the bar.
I was even able to see some almonds, which was not the case with the Nature Valley bar where none of the ingredients were distinguishable.

All in all, I preferred the Odwalla bar because of its mix of salty and sweet, which is something the Nature Valley bar had tried and failed. I also felt completely satisfied after the Odwalla bar, instead of hoping for more after the Nature Valley. The fact that I understand the Odwalla to be healthier than the Nature Valley but that I liked it better alarms me. It is really not as healthy as one would be led to believe, or is it really possibly for things to taste good and be healthy too?