Are Clif Bars Healthy? Chocolate Chip Clif Bar Nutrition Facts and Ingredients

Chocolate Chip Clif Bar nutrition facts: is it healthy?

It depends on what you use it for, but as an everyday snack it is closer to a cereal bar than to a health food. Here is one 68 g bar, from the label data in Open Food Facts:

Clif's own nutrition panel gives the same numbers: 250 calories, 6 g of fat, 2 g of saturated fat, 130 mg of sodium, 43 g of carbohydrates, 5 g of fiber, 17 g of total sugars and 10 g of protein. It also shows what the per-100 g data cannot: 16 g of those 17 g are added sugars, which is 32% of the daily value in one bar.

The good part: 5 g of fiber, low saturated fat, and oats as the first ingredient. The weaker part: a quarter of the bar by weight is sugar, and almost all of that sugar is added from syrups. The 10 g of protein is modest for a 250 calorie bar, so it is not a protein bar.

What's in a Clif Bar

The label lists 14 ingredients, many of them organic. They fall into four groups.

• Oats and soy. organic rolled oats, organic roasted soybeans and organic soy flour. These are the whole-food base of the bar.
• Sweeteners. organic brown rice syrup, organic tapioca syrup and organic cane syrup. Together they supply the 16 g of added sugar.
• Protein crisps. soy rice crisps, made from soy protein isolate, rice flour and barley malt extract. This is the main source of the extra protein and the crunch.
• Taste and shelf life. unsweetened chocolate, chicory fiber, sunflower and/or soybean oil, natural flavors, salt, organic cinnamon and mixed tocopherols, a form of vitamin E used as an antioxidant.

The bar contains soy. Clif's label says it may contain peanuts, tree nuts, milk, sesame and wheat.

Are Clif Bars ultra-processed?

Yes, this one is. NOVA is the food-processing scale used in nutrition research. Group 4, ultra-processed, covers foods that contain ingredients you would not cook with at home. The researchers who created NOVA name soya protein isolate as one of those ingredients, and say that one or more of them in the ingredient list marks a product as ultra-processed (Monteiro et al., 2019). The soy rice crisps in this bar contain soy protein isolate, and natural flavors point the same way.

Organic does not change that. Organic rules cover how the crops are grown, not how far the food is processed. Most of the ingredients here are organic, and the bar is still NOVA 4.

Large reviews of the research link diets high in ultra-processed food with higher risks of heart disease deaths and type 2 diabetes (Lane et al., BMJ, 2024). Those studies are observational and look at the whole diet, not at one bar now and then.

Why the Truvi score is 33

The Truvi score (our method) blends how processed a food is with its nutritional quality. For this bar, processing scores 30 out of 100: NOVA group 4, with one listed additive (mixed tocopherols). Nutrition scores 35 out of 100, which is Nutri-Score D on our calculation. Nutri-Score is the A to E nutrition grade used on packs in Europe; the sugar is what pulls this bar down, while the fiber and protein pull it up a little.

We also check how easy a food is to overeat. About 22% of this bar's calories come from fat and 27% from sugar. Researchers who built a numeric definition of hyper-palatable foods, foods that are easy to keep eating, used more than 20% of calories from fat together with more than 20% from sugar as one of their markers (Fazzino et al., 2019). This bar meets that marker, at 3.7 calories per gram.

So the score does not say the bar is useless. During a long hike or ride, fast carbs are the point. As a daily desk snack, it is a sugary, ultra-processed bar, and the bars below score clearly higher.

Bars that score higher on our scale

These bars all score 60 or more on the same scale, mainly because they have far less sugar and more protein per bar. They are also ultra-processed (NOVA 4), so they are not a way to avoid processing. They are a way to cut sugar.

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  IQ BAR Chocolate Sea Salt

  Almonds are the first ingredient. Per 45 g bar: 180 calories, 12 g protein and 1 g sugar.

  NOVA 4 · Photo: macrofactor, CC BY-SA 3.0

  61Good

• 

  Stars and Honey Protein Bar

  Almonds, pea protein and collagen, sweetened with allulose and monk fruit. Per 47 g bar: 180 calories, 15 g protein, 6 g fiber and 2 g sugar.

  NOVA 4 · Photo: fooducate.63E2D86D-D735-CE08-4FCE-A2350DCD451F, CC BY-SA 3.0

  63Good

• 

  IQ BAR Almond Butter Chip

  Almonds first, with pea protein crisps and a prebiotic fiber blend, sweetened with stevia.

  NOVA 4 · Photo: chancewash, CC BY-SA 3.0

  62Good

• 

  David Fudge Brownie Flavored Bar

  Per 62 g bar: 150 calories, 28 g protein and 0 g sugar. The protein comes from milk protein isolate, whey and egg white, and it is sweetened with sucralose and acesulfame potassium.

  NOVA 4 · Photo: fooducate.C355EB3A-E1AA-11E2-A74D-1E047F0525AB, CC BY-SA 3.0

  61Good

• 

  David Cake Batter Flavored Bar

  The same base as the Fudge Brownie bar, per 62 g bar 150 calories and 28 g protein, with soy lecithin and sucralose.

  NOVA 4 · Photo: fooducate.6AA4C761-0A2F-45F1-4E7A-80CBF7DAE920, CC BY-SA 3.0

  60Good

Full ingredient list and nutrition

Organic rolled oats, organic brown rice syrup, soy rice crisps (soy protein isolate, rice flour, barley malt extract), organic roasted soybeans, organic tapioca syrup, organic cane syrup, unsweetened chocolate, chicory fiber, organic soy flour, sunflower and/or soybean oil, natural flavors, salt, organic cinnamon, mixed tocopherols (antioxidant).

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