Clif Bar, Gatorade Bar, Quest Bar, are all popular types of protein bars on the market. But are they the only ones? Are they the best?

All protein bars come with different purposes and different reasons to buy. Throughout the article I will be focusing on 4 main categories: Best for cutting, best for bulking, and best overall, and worst overall. 

As someone who wrestles, I’m always looking to lose weight while maintaining a healthy lifestyle and maintaining muscle. To do this, you must lower your caloric intake, while keeping your protein intake high. This is a popular bodybuilding tactic to stay lean while keeping all of your muscle mass. This tactic is known as cutting. 

Bulking is quite the opposite. When bulking, your goal is to increase your calories, while keeping your protein intake sky high. This gives the consumer some leeway when it comes to taste and nutrition. 

Though it comes down to individual taste buds and preferences, here’s the breakdown for most popular, least popular, best for cutting, and best for bulking. 

To start, the most popular bar was the Clif Bar. These bars have a wide range of flavors, thus making them appeal highly to a wider range of consumers. These bars are mainly used as a source of energy, rather than protein. They come standard with around 250 calories, and pack in 10 grams of protein. 

Gatorade Bars came in a close second. These were favored by more of the athletes, due to the larger amount of protein. These bars come with around 350 calories and 20 grams of protein.  

Next was the best bars for Cutting (losing weight). There is mainly 1 bar that runs away with this honor. This belongs to the BUILT bar. These bars have an extremely low calorie count of 130, while packing in 17 grams of protein. The benefits of his bar greatly outweigh the single negative of it being hard to find. They are only sold at Wegmans grocery stores, and online on sites such as amazon. Once these bars are found, they are a great way to aid in dieting and losing weight.

In contrast, the best bars for bulking (gaining weight) include one of the overall favorites. Gatorade bars are a very tasty option with a couple flavors that appeal to many. The flavors include: chocolate, cookies n cream, and caramel. As stated above, these bars come with 350 calories and around 20 grams of protein. 

Along with these great options comes the bars that are not as popular. These are the bars that you would walk right past in a store. Quest Bars ran away with this honor. Though these bars are quite healthy, they are said to taste very chalky. They also have very enticing pictures on the labels, but end up tasting nothing like the real thing.  

Overall, protein bars may not appeal to everyone, but when they do appeal to a consumer, there are definitely some that appeal to more people such as the Clif bar, and some that should be avoided, such as the quest bar.