Kind Bars: Will You Still Eat Them After FDA Warning?

For anyone who has ever tasted a Kind bar after grabbing one of the snacks that purport to be healthier than grabbing a Snickers candy bar, say, in your local CVS store, the news that Kind bars have come under FDA fire, as reported by CNN Money, could make a snacker curious — but not enough to stop buying the products that claim to have no trans fats and act as a good place for folks to grab fiber.?

As reported by CBS News, the FDA says that those Kind snack bars aren’t as much of a health food as they claim to be, and now the government agency has targeted the snack food for its healthy claims — because to the FDA, that word is reserved for snacks containing no greater than one gram of saturated fat for each 40-gram serving. The fruit and nut snack bars don’t all fall under those guidelines, says the Food and Drug Administration in a new warning letter.

That means a minimum of four flavors of the Kind bars have to remove the “healthy” wording — including their Kind Plus Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate + Protein, Fruit & Nut Almond & Apricot, Fruit & Nut Almond & Coconut (which has 5 grams of saturated fat for each serving) and Kind Plus Dark Chocolate Cherry Cashew + Antioxidants bars.

There’s no telling how much of a dent this will place in the phenomenal sales growth of the Kind bar makers, which grew a whopping 82 percent in 2014. The warning letter came to the New York firm in March, a company that will now have to spend the resources to adjust its packaging and communications and advertising accordingly. Kind, LLC has not specified how exactly they will rebrand their bars, which contain from 2.5 to 3.5 grams of saturated fat for every 40-gram serving size — and how removing the plus sign on their packaging will affect their bottom line.

As reported by the Inquisitr, Kind bars and other natural ingredient foods are the kinds of snacks pegged by dieters looking to lose weight, along with tools such as using weight loss apps that help dieters envision how they may appear after losing weight. However, because Kind bars have a boatload of nuts in them, their saturated and unsaturated fat content has caused them to run afoul of the FDA guidelines for healthy food fare. Yet and still, the two to three grams of fiber, and protein contents of plenty of the Kind bars — along with ingredients that are easy to identify and pronounce, like honey — still make them a fan favorite, despite the FDA warning.

[Image via Kind, LLC]