Pick up a "healthy" snack bar at the supermarket and flip it over. Most carry ten or more ingredients — several kinds of syrup, an oil, a stabiliser, sometimes a flavouring to mask the rest. A date and a few nuts have exactly the ingredients you'd expect, because that's all there is.
Reading past the front of the box
The front of a snack bar wrapper says "natural" or "no added sugar" more often than the back supports it. Dates themselves are sweet enough on their own that a date-and-nut bar doesn't need syrup to hold together — check any bar that lists "dates" first on the ingredient list, and you'll usually see a much shorter list overall.
What a plain version looks like
Blitz pitted dates with a handful of walnuts or almonds in a food processor until it holds together, press it flat, and cut it into squares. That's the entire ingredient list for a snack bar most stores charge several ringgit each for. It keeps in an airtight container for a couple of weeks without needing anything added to preserve it.
Where the store-bought version still wins
Convenience is real — a wrapped bar survives a bag all day without getting sticky, and it travels better in hot weather than a homemade batch. If buying packaged, look for one where dates or whole nuts are the first two ingredients rather than sugar or "fruit juice concentrate", which is usually just sugar under another name.
Dried fruit as the middle ground
Dried mango, apricot, or raisins sit between a fresh date and a processed bar — minimal processing, but check the pack for added sugar anyway, since some brands sugar-coat dried fruit that's already sweet on its own. A mix of dates, nuts, and one dried fruit covers most of what a snack bar is trying to be, at a fraction of the price per serving — see current date prices to work out the cost per batch.
The short version
Fewer ingredients usually means less has been done to the food before it reaches you. Dates and nuts pass that test without effort; most snack bars need the ingredient label read carefully to know if they do too.