What really is in an ingredient needed to put together a recipe?

That question – and the idea of fairness – popped in my head while I was laying out the last post that compared the ingredients of a random sample of store bought packaged power bars…

…with a homemade power bar sandwich made with the ingredients shown here.

As shown above, the packaged bars all have their ingredients listed by quantity in order of the most used to least used ingredient.

I listed the ingredients used to make the power bar sandwich in the same way: whole grain bread; choice of honey, jam or cookie spread; nut butter; fresh fruit; raisins; and chocolate chips.

But my list doesn’t say it all. Sure, bananas are bananas, blueberries are blueberries and raisins are raisins. And, the nut butter I use I make myself with just lightly salted and unsalted almonds and ground flaxseed, as shown here.

But the rest of the ingredients are much more complex, meaning that they themselves are made with a lot of ingredients. Here’s what’s in the whole grain bread I used to make the power bar sandwich:

Though I’m not a big fan of the added sugar, the rest of the ingredients look fine to me – and I’m sure not going to start off making the power bar sandwich by first baking the bread needed to make that sandwich.

Then there’s the choice of honey, jam and/or cookie spread. As shown below, the honey is just honey. The jam is made with fig paste, sugar, water and lemon juice. Simple enough.

But then there’s the cookie spread, which tastes great but is also made with many more ingredients than the honey and jam, including a good shot of added sugar. (A quick side note regarding nutrition labels: the first thing to check on any nutrition label is serving size. As you can see in the above picture, the cookie spread serving size is 2 tablespoons, which is twice the serving size of the 1 tablespoon serving size for honey and jam. That means that tablespoon for tablespoon, which is about all you need to make the power bar sandwich, fig butter has 45 calories, honey has 60 calories and cookie spread has 85 calories.)

Finally, here are the ingredients needed to make the chocolate chips:

The point here is that there are actually a lot of unseen/unnoticed ingredients that go into complex ingredients, like the bread and spreads, needed to make the power bar sandwich just as there are many ingredients that go into making any recipe that calls for prepared ingredients like canned or jarred products, sauces and seasonings – or just about anything found in the center aisles of the the grocery store.

The key take away here is that it’s important to be curious about what exactly you are putting into any food you make, especially if you have dietary restrictions. Being curious then means actually looking at nutrition labels in the store and deciding what works best for you before actually buying that food. Yes, that takes a bit more time, but the payoff to you and those sharing what you make for them to eat is well worth that time.