Review: Six Star Pro Nutrition Chocolate Deluxe Protein Bar

For those of you that read sports magazines on occasion, I think that you'll probably agree with me that ESPN Magazine is horrible.  It's basically a goofball propaganda machine that is disguising itself as a real magazine.  My dislike of the magazine and the network itself (that's a LONG story for a different day) aside, I did find a coupon for a free Six Star Pro Nutrition Chocolate Deluxe Protein Bar in a recent issue as I was thumbing through it, so that was a nice surprise and just about the only worthwhile thing I can remember seeing in the magazine in quite some time.  The coupon was exclusive to Walmart, so I knocked off a few IQ points and made my way over there to pick up this 1.7 ounce protein bar.  The bar is 190 calories and packs twenty grams of protein punch that is made up of natural and artificial flavors.  The tagline on the wrapper is "Chewy and Delicious" and while I'd like to say that I am the judge of that, I clearly am not since the wrapper also includes a gold medal for superior taste from the American Masters of Taste.  Alrighty then, I had no idea that existed.  So, I guess I'll be judging my tastes against theirs in this instance.

I find the wrapper of this compared to the picture of this to be somewhat misleading.  On the wrapper, the interior of the bar has a light, almost caramel like color.  As you can see in my picture above, the interior of the bar is more of a dull tan.  I can't say that kind of disparity is unexpected as I've grown up on pictures of delicious look fast food marketing pictures that look like total failures in real life, but it's still not a great start.  Being that this bar was chocolate deluxe, basically everything in the bar was chocolate in both appearance and aroma.  I will say that the interior of the bar had a soft texture to it and along with the smell and look of it, this reminded me quite a bit of a Milky Way candy bar.  That aroma must have been part of the artificial flavor of this bar because the chocolate smell definitely did have that kind of manufactured smell to it.

So I took my first bite and this was quite a chewy bar.  When I say chewy, I don't mean it had a lot of crunch or anything like that, but I mean that it instead was similar to a piece of gum.  It was quite strange and I can still say that after having had several protein bars that have interiors with similar chewy textures.  Chewiness aside, this bar was all chocolate, all the time.  Call it deluxe if you want (Like the attempt at humor there?  I didn't think so.).  Anyway, the chocolate was dense and rich, but it didn't have a high degree of sweetness to it at all.  It was kind of flat, to be honest.  Going back to my wrapper comparison, the wrapper clearly shows that there'd be some bits of chocolate in the interior of this bar.  I didn't find any and if they were there, they melted so quickly in my mouth that I could not detect any sort of textural difference.  If they were there though, they just added more to the deluxeness of all the chocolate flavoring.  One thing I will note though is that you need to have a glass of water or something nearby while eating this because this is one of those protein bars that'll make you extremely thirsty as you make your way through it and it also becomes somewhat difficult to swallow because it dries out your mouth.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Looking back at this review, it really seems like all I did with what I wrote was bash this bar which is kind of amusing because I found this bar to be fairly decent, so I'd give it a BUY IT rating.  The bar isn't anything more than chocolate really and that's fine since that's all it wanted and advertised itself to be.  Now, if you are in need of something other than chocolate, you will not enjoy this.  If you just want a chocolate blast, albeit not overly sweet, to fill your chocolate craving with a extra helping of protein, this bar will do you just fine.

BUY IT!!