Patter Matters

Protein has become the organizing principle of the American snack food aisle. Walk through any grocery store and you will find bars, shakes, pouches, and bites marketed around a single number: grams of protein per serving. The higher the number, the better the product, or so the logic goes. Twenty grams. Thirty grams. Some brands push forty. The number is real. What produced it often isn't. How Protein Bars Get Their Protein Numbers There are two ways to put protein into a bar. The first is whole food. Almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts — these contain protein as part...

There is a fact about most energy bars that rarely appears in their marketing: they are designed to sit on a shelf — or in a gym bag, a glove compartment, an airplane seatback pocket — for up to a year without spoiling. Think about that for a moment. Real food does not do that. A banana lasts a few days. Almonds, stored properly, last a few months. Medjool dates, refrigerated, last about a year — but at room temperature, considerably less. Dried fruit, depending on how it was processed, lasts weeks to months. An energy bar made entirely of...

Children eat differently than adults. They eat more frequently, in smaller amounts, and with less control over what's in front of them. The snacks they eat between meals are not incidental — they are a meaningful part of what their bodies are built from during the years that matter most. This makes the quality of children's snack food a more consequential question than the packaging usually suggests. The Ultra-Processed Food Problem for Children Research on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has accelerated significantly in recent years. A 2023 analysis published in the British Medical Journal found that higher UPF consumption was associated...

The conversation around seed oils has shifted significantly in recent years. What was once a fringe concern has moved into mainstream food culture, driven by a growing body of research and a consumer base increasingly willing to read past the front of the package. The question is no longer whether seed oils deserve scrutiny. It is what to do about them practically — especially when it comes to packaged snacks, where seed oils are nearly ubiquitous. What Are Seed Oils? Seed oils are oils extracted from seeds through industrial processes. The list includes canola oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower...