Shifty Nutrition Labeling Practices May Give You More Carbs Than You Bargained For

One of the points I constantly harp on is READ YOUR LABELS to find out the nutrition in everything you buy to put inside that mouth of yours. It's the only way for you to know EXACTLY what you are allowing to enter your body right down to the exact number of carbohydrates you are eating.

Or is it?

I recently became aware of a shifty numbers game that the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) allows regarding nutrition labeling on your favorite low-carb foods. When you see 1g net carbs listed on a nutrition label of that low-carb product you have purchased, would you believe it is POSSIBLE that very same product might actually be closer to 2g or even 3g net carbs instead?

WHAT?! How can this be?

It's all in the rounding that the FDA allows companies to do with the carbs especially. When you are livin' la vida low-carb, you can come up with the net effective carbohydrate count by taking the total carbs and subtracting the dietary fiber and sugar alcohols.

For example, here's the nutritional info for a low-carb product:

Total carbohydrate: 19g
Dietary fiber: 8g
Sugar alcohol (i.e. erythritol): 10g

That would be 19 minus 8 for the fiber and minus 10 more for the sugar alcohol for a grand net carb total of 1, right? The unsuspecting low-carber might think that's low enough to eat TWO servings since that would equal a mere 2g net carbs.

But watch this...

According to the FDA Nutritional Guidelines on rounding (See Section II, #7), < .5g of dietary fiber or sugar alcohols can be considered zero carb because they allow them to be rounded down when the value is 0.49 or less.

So let's look at our example again:

Total carbohydrate: 19.49g (rounds to 19g)
Dietary fiber: 7.5g (rounds up to 8g)
Sugar alcohol (i.e. erythritol): 9.5g (rounds up to 10g)

When you take the 19.49g of total carbs and subtract the 7.5 for dietary fiber and 9.5 for sugar alcohol, you are left with a carb count of 2.49g net carbs, NOT just 1g net carb as the packaging shows and as you assumed to be true. When you add that second serving of this product that was thought to be 1g net carb, the low-carb product you just ate actually may have been a lot closer to 5g net carbs instead of just 2g. Whoa!

While that may not sound like a lot, compound that problem with EVERY SINGLE LOW-CARB PRODUCT you eat and you can easily see how those sneaky extra carbs that the FDA is allowing to be excluded from the actually labeling can quickly add up to a lot more carbs than you expected. When you are in the early stages of counting carbs, this is especially important to watch out for because even a few extra carbs may kick you out of ketosis and stall your weight loss.

Of course, not all low-carb products have this issue, but the rounding issue is a problem that you must be aware of and willing to deal with. I know that I routinely added an extra .5 to 1g of carbs to almost EVERY labeled product I ate when I was losing my 180 pounds in 2004 on the Atkins diet. It helped me keep from overconsuming carbohydrates that I did not need.

A word to the wise...watch out for those shifty nutrition labeling practices!

Play The Great Atkins Sugar Hunt

Have you seen the latest contest our friends at Atkins.com have created to help spread the word about all the hidden sugars found in the so-called health foods on grocery market shelves today? It's called "The Great Atkins Sugar Hunt" and the winners get a free eDiets membership for Atkins counseling! WOO HOO!!! Wouldn't that be a great thing to have if you're just starting out livin' la vida low-carb?!

There are so many products on supermarket shelves today that claim to be healthy, but are anything but that because of the excessive amount of sugar contained in them. This includes virtually all of the "low-fat" foods, energy protein bars and even some allegedly "low-carb" foods.

Did you know a chocolate peanut butter Powerbar Performance bar has 20 grams of sugar because of the high fructose corn syrup and juice concentrate additives? That is double the amount of sugar that is in a Krispy Kreme doughnut!!!

On a low-carb lifestyle, sugar is one of your primary enemies and I address and entire chapter in my upcoming book to this subject. I think you'll like the name of the chapter I came up with. But more on that when the book comes out.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the average American consumes 158 pounds of various sugars annually. WOW! That's a lot a sugar clogging the inside of our bodies. What's most disturbing to me is that the average is probably a lot higher than that for a lot of people since people doing low-carb consume little to no sugar at all. That means there are some people out there eating upwards of 300 pounds of sugar in a year! Do these people keep a sugar-IV on them or what?!

It is a known fact that sugar is one of the primary reasons we have an obesity problem in the United States today and is likely the culprit in the rapid increase in diabetes and other health ailments. But even when you are doing the low-carb lifestyle, you have to be careful about the hidden sugars manufacturers don't want you to notice on the "healthy" versions of their products.

This new contest will help you understand the importance of reading food labels and recognizing when there are hidden sugars found in so-called healthy foods. You need to hurry because they are only giving the free three-month eDiets.com subscription to the first 1000 people who can identify no more than 10 food or beverage products that make claims like "low-fat," "low-carb" or "healthy" and add up to at least 50 grams of sugars (based on a per-serving count) in total.

If you get stuck and need some assistance with this endeavor, you can visit Atkins University to study a course in "Reading Labels" to educate yourself further about how to do this.

I would like to personally thank Atkins Nutritionals for providing this reminder that we need to constantly be on guard when we are shopping for foods we can eat while engaging in a low-carb lifestyle. Hidden sugars are a detriment to your ultimate goal of losing weight and keeping it off. Take advantage of this opportunity to educate yourself and win a great prize that will help you along the way! If you are one of the winners, then post a comment here and let us know!