As you can probably tell from my previous reviews (mostly today in fact) I am usually a Special K girl through and through, but desperate times call for desperate measures and when you are at work, absolutely starving with either a choice between a Jaffa Cake or an Alpen bar from the shop there isn't much choice. Yes I know most of you normal people out there would say its no choice and go for the Jaffa Cake, but I am no normal person, I am a crazed person on a diet. So really I thought I might as well quell my special k snobbiness and just get the Alpen Bar.

Despite my disappointment at not being able to find the Special K bar I wanted (id already eaten my Special K bliss bar this morning) I was impressed by the fact that the Alpen light bar did say on the packet that it was less than 70 calories, which is in fact less than the special K bar.

In fact upon reading the nutritional information at the back I was really quite surprised to see that this really is a nutritionally superior bar to the Special K bar. The Alpen Bar has only 62 calories per bar compared to the Special K 89 calories , and has only 0.35 g of saturated fat per bar than the special k value of 2g. This is quite a significant difference in fat for a bar of the same size!!! Also the sugar content of the Alpen bar is 4.5g whereas Special K can have up to a whopping 8g per bar! I also noticed that the Alpen bar has 4.6 g of fibre per bar, which is unprecedented for a cereal snack bar, the Special K bar having only a paltry 0.8g of fibre.

Now as much as I love my special K bars, being pretty serious about being healthy and watching my weight I couldn't help but be shocked by these differences.

When opening the packet I noticed the bar was the same size as the Special K bars and of a pretty similar look. It is made up of Alpen muesli style flakes with bits of dried apple and orange mixed in. It then has a very thin dark chocolate drizzle on top, which to be honest I scoffed at. Little did I know that upon eating it you really would be able to taste the chocolate and the orange so much so that you could pretend you were eating some chocolate orange, or even a little Jaffa Cake like the others in the office.

The taste was not as sweet as the Special K bars and perhaps not quite as good for me but I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was tasty with a strong orange and chocolate flavour. Most importantly for me however the differences in nutrition were enough to shock me out of my Special K obsession...a mere few hours after writing my praise for the special k bliss bar I think I will actually start buying Alpen light bars from now on!!