BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Low Carb Counting Carbs Correctly...Good vs Bad

Label Example:
Carbohydrates............25 grams
Fiber..................10 grams
Sugar..................10 grams
If Fiber & Sugar account for 20/25 grams of the Carbohydrates per serving, then what kind of carb is the remaining 5 grams? And is it good or bad carbs?

Sugar IS carbs!! Sugar is exactly what we are trying to avoid here. The whole purpose of low carb is to avoid sugar <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

So all you subtract is fiber. Think of fiber as cardboard. You eat it in your mouth, you poop it out your rear end, it doesn't get absorbed or processed at all. It can't turn into fat. So anything else that is a carb that you ingest IS going to turn into fat.

Good / Bad is not a real thing. There is no such thing as a good carb or a bad carb. What people generally mean is like this -

"you eat 20g of carbs and it is all sugar in an ice cream sundae. This is bad."

"you eat 20g of carbs by eating a large helping of broccoli. This is good because of all the nutrients you are getting."

It's about eating things that are healthy - not eating junk food.

Thanks for responding & I understand what you are saying. That's just common sense. Still my question hasn't been answered. If 20 grams out of 25 grams of carbohydrates consist of simple sugar & fiber (10 grams each), then what type of carbohydrate is the remaining 5 grams, complex or simple?

As stated above, nutritional carbs may be part of the rest of the carb count as with broccoli, etc.

Read the ingredients. There are other carbs that aren't sugar or fiber. You should be able to tell this by reading the ingredients.

Sometimes manufacturers use other sweetners that are at least as bad as sugar but do not have to be listed as sugar. In many cases these are made from corn. Some things to watch for are high fructose corn syrup, corn sweetner, etc.

If I see an ingredient I do not recognize, I search for it on the internet to see what it really is. I have always been able to find out that way. Sometimes it is hard to tell if the ingredient is a low cal sweetner or a bad one until you get familar with the various names for various artificial sweetners.

I have been eating like this for a long time, and I can usually tell by my body's reaction when I eat something I have been avoiding.

Just recently, I bought some sugar free ice cream bars with 90 calories each. (I am on maintenance no longer trying to lose weight. However, I continue to do low carb to avoid the cravings that sugar causes.)

Anyway, I found the bars giving me cravings like I used to get. At first I thought it was the chocolate because I love chocolate. Then I researched every ingredient. I found that one of the ingredients was one of the main additives to products used to help recover after a workout. It is supposed to be a slow release carbohydrate, but it certainly wasn't affecting me that way. Until I did the research, I thought it was another calorie free sweetner because the name sounded like one! It was one of the first ingredients listed. (Remember that ingredients are listed in the order of most to least. So if it is the first ingredient, there is lots of it in the product!)

forcegx7 - let me try explaining this differently. When you look at a nutritional label it is NOT making any judgement about "simple sugar" or "complex sugar" or anything else. All it is telling you is:

* total carbohydrates
* fiber to subtract

everything else is a carbohydrate that counts. Those carbs will all "get into you".

Now if you care about how QUICKLY they get into you, i.e. will it digest "quickly" or "slowly", you have to look at the *ingredients* if you want to start making guesses about "how the particular ingredients will affect me". What you are talking about is the *glycemic index* (how quickly a particular kind of sugar is absorbed) but that has a lot to do with how the food was cooked, what the temperature of the food is in, etc. That information is NOT on a nutritional label <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

But the blood sugar part has to do with keeping a blood sugar level under control. The carbs part has to do with total weight gain. If you ingest 80g of carbs, it doesn't matter if it gets in slowly or quickly. In the end, all 80g of those carbs will be on your thighs, and that is what low carb is trying to avoid.

Here's an example. Spinach has natural sugars in it. If you ate Spinach raw, those sugars would digest very slowly, because of the fiber and other things attached to the sugars. If instead you boiled the spinach for an hour before you ate it, all of that fiber breaks down, and if you ate the Spinach then you could get a super quick digesting sugar rush. How could they label that on the package? They have no idea what you're doing to do with the food <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> The package only tells you the natural fiber content, and the natural carbohydrate count - i.e. the basic components of the food you're getting. How you digest them, quickly or slowly, depends on a lot of other things.