All appear to offer a good percentage of your daily nutrient and calorie needs. Because they often taste like paste, they become candy bars without guilt . Oriented toward the snack or supplement market, these tend to have things like various nuts and seeds, and are traditionally marketed to athletes and pseudo-athletes. The Clif Bar, Power Bar, etc are examples. These meal replacement bars tend toward a taffy-like texture and rarely have recognizable grains, seeds or nuts.
Hospital food comes home.
Merging the athletic snack bar and the nutriceutical bar, oriented toward the dieter or body builder, these offer extra nutrients the buyer may seek to comply with a self-selected dietary program. The bar was originally developed for consumers with special dietary needs such as diabetes, heart disease, and hypoglycemia. All these bars tend to contain roughly either a sixth or a third of average daily caloric and nutritional needs, with diet bars having fewer calories. Both dieticians and social scientists dispute the desirability of this trend. My greatest fear is that we just have this disordered eating in general.