Carbwell Balance Bars

Carbwell Bars for Low Insulin Levels

This site contains information on many types of Zone perfect bars, Balance bars or similar lines of nutrition meal replacement diet bars.

Carb Well Balance bars come in two flavors -- Chocolate Peanut Butter and Caramel N Chocolate.

Carbwell Balance Bars Taste Good

The Chocolate Peanut Butter consists of an inside core of peanut butter topped with a layer of caramel that's gooey and chewy. The entire bar is coated with a layer of chocolate.

The Caramel N Chocolate bar consists of an inside core of chewy chocolate, also topped with a layer of chewy caramel, and entirely surrounded by a layer of chocolate.

The angle to Carb Well bars is that they are extremely low in net carbohydrates, therefore high in protein, but therefore attractive to people who want to severely limit their intake of carbohydrates to keep their insulin within healthy limits, not spiked to produce an unhealthy hormonal effect in the body.

Therefore, these bars contain a total of 23 grams of carbohydrates, which does not sound low. However, 1 gram is not absorbed because of the fiber in the bars. Most importantly, 20 grams of their carbs come from sugar alcohol, which contains no calories. Therefore, these meal replacement diet bars advertise they contain 2 grams of carbohydrates.

Carbwell Bars Contain Less Carbohydrates Than Balance Bars

If that was all they really contained, they'd be a protein food and would not be popular as a diet bar because they wouldn't taste sweet.

The question in my mind, however, was just because the sugar alcohol contains no calories, does that mean it has no effect on blood levels of your insulin?

Sugar alcohols are generally not as sweet as sucrose (table sugar). They are not metabolized by the bacteria in your mouth, so they don't contribute to tooth decay.

Some of them contribute toward making your mouth feel cool, so they're used in sugarless hard candy and chewing gum.

Most importantly, sugar alcohols are incompletely absorbed through digestion in your small intestine. This means they have less of a glycemic effect on your blood sugar levels than regular table sugar (sucrose), which has a glycemic index of 60.

Carb Well Bars Keep Your Insulin Low

Therefore, sugar alcohols are better to eat than regular carbohydrates and apparently are used in other foods for diabetics.

However, there are a few caveats. The bar nutrition label doesn't say exactly which sugar alcohol is used in these diet bars. Their glycemic levels range from 52 (still quite high) to 0, which is obviously very low. If you're diabetic or simply want to keep your insulin low, the difference there is quite significant. I don't see a glycemic index on the bar's label.

Also, because of this incomplete digestion, the sugar alcohol can accumulate and ferment in your small intestine, causing gas and bloating. And these reactions vary among people. What bothers somebody else may not affect you at all, or vice versa.

Therefore, when eating Carb Well Balance bars is overall a good thing -- certainly much healthier than eating a lot of high sugar, high carbohydrate foods -- but do be careful not too eat too many of them too fast.