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Mother Earth Oaty Slices | Chewsday Review

Today's Chewsday review is of Mother Earth Oaty Slices, and I chose the basic "golden oats" bar to put under the microscope today. Mother Earth also have fruit variations of this bar, but they may be for another Chewsday!

Ingredients

Whole grain cereals (47%), butter, golden syrup (13%), desiccated coconut (12%), brown sugar, whole egg powder, raising agents (450, 500), natural flavour, natural colour.
The majority of the cereal content (96%) is oats, with the rest as flour.
Raising agents 450 and 500 are substances that produce gas in the dough to bulk it out. These are non-harmful ingredients, although a small minority of people may have a sensitivity to 450.

Positives

Negatives

these bars have a high fat content, and my particular concern is about the high saturated fat content. General healthy guidelines suggest aiming for less than 10g of total fat and less than 3g of saturated fat per 100g. These Oaty Slices have 24.6g of fat and 15.5g of saturated fat per 100g. That is a LOT more than the recommendations. It’s also a lot more than most other muesli bars out there. For example, these bars have double the fat content and SIX TIMES the saturated fat content of Carman’s fruit and nut bars (see my review of these from two weeks ago). Most of the fat content comes from the butter and the coconut.
the sugar content of Oaty Slices is also reasonably high at 22.4g per 100g, exceeding recommendations of 15g per 100g. Most of this sugar comes from golden syrup and brown sugar. Just as a side note, these two forms of sugar are no better or worse than regular white sugar.
the sodium content of these bars also seem to be a lot higher than most other muesli style bars with 169mg of sodium per 100g. This is below the general recommendations, but is 8 times more than Carman’s or Uncle Toby’s muesli bars.

Marketing

They only use Australian of New Zealand oats. Great.
They add NATURAL ingredients like butter and whole grains. Natural does not necessarily equal good for you. In fact, the butter is the main source of the saturated fat and sodium in these bars.
They “bake the bars, just like you would at home”. Wow, this statement takes up 1/3 of the back of the packet. I think Mother Earth might be scraping the barrel here too…

Alternatives