• Eat Natural bars
• From 69p
• Eat Natural

Hurrah for the timely arrival of some tasty comestibles – it’s lunchtime, after all. These Eat Natural bars aren’t intended as all-out athletic energy fuel, more as a healthy snack. So you won’t find any clever supplements or energy-boosting ingredients in them, just natural stuff like nuts and fruit. Oh, and chocolate…

Obviously anything you eat is going to give you energy, but “energy” bars are generally designed to give you a rapidly-assimilated form of carbohydrate to keep you riding longer. The Eat Natural bars have this covered up to a point with the fruit and things, but most flavours also have either glucose syrup or chocolate in them which isn’t reckoned to be optimum ride fuel.

But it does mean that they taste good, which is a bonus. After all, there’s no point a bar having all sorts of super-clever ingredients if you can’t actually get it down you. These are available in nine flavours – Cranberry and Macadamia with Belgian Dark Chocolate is probably our favourite. Some of the nuttier ones are quite dry and best eaten with, ideally, a cup of tea. The flavours are split into three ranges – ones with chocolate, ones without chocolate and organic ones. None of them have any artificial colours or flavours.

Eat Natural bars are available in all sorts of shops including Sainsburys, Tesco, Waitrose and Boots.

Positives: Tasty, reasonably priced, readily available.

Negatives: Not as effective as a purpose-designed energy bar.

Verdict: Eat Natural bars don’t make any particular claim to be super-special magic energy bars. Just a straightforward, reasonably healthy snack food. Can’t argue with that – certainly worth a try and good to have a couple in your pack for variety.