Losing It

Farm Animal Diet

Recently I've started to see No Pudge Fudge products showing up in the grocery store complete with the bright pink pig on the front. The fat free brownie mix provides a way to get that chewy chocolatey goodness without the guilt. My friend tried them and thought they were great..I have yet to give them a try.

But first, there was Skinny Cow providing us with all kinds of yummy frozen treats. I love the ice cream sandwiches are are the perfect 130 calorie treat for a summer night. They come in lots of flavors and I'm a big fan of foods that are already portioned out into individual servings so these are perfect. They recently added a line of low-carb options as well (low carb is taking over!). Slightly higher in calories they have about have the carbs and only 3g net impact carbs.

But what are Net Impact Carbs? I decided to do a little research to find out more. The first place I looked was the Atkins Website. Since the Atkins diet centers around a low-carb lifestyle it was the obvious choice and I did find some useful information:

At Atkins Nutritionals, we specially formulate our products to taste great while minimizing the impact of carbohydrates on your blood sugar level. We do this by understanding that not all carbohydrates behave the same way in your body. While most carbs–sugar is the best example–are digested and turned into blood sugar, other carbs behave differently. Some are digested by your body but not turned into glucose and some carbs–such as fiber–are not digested at all and pass through your body as waste....We use certain carbohydrates in Atkins products and avoid others. Instead of using sugar in any of its forms (glucose, fructose, lactose or maltose), we rely on sweeteners such as sucralose (marketed as Splenda®). We also use glycerine and sugar alcohols such as maltitol as sweeteners, as well as polydextrose, which is also a bulking agent and serves as a source of added fiber. Fiber, glycerine, maltitol and polydextrose are carbohydrates that have a minimal impact on blood sugar.

Okay, so net carbs are what are left after the carbs our body just can't digest are "passed" right? Well, not exactly. Fiber is not digested but the other carbs still are-they just don't cause the blood sugar levels to rise as much or as quickly which may help keep that extra fat away.

So, do we even even need to count the calories from those non-net carbs if we are watching calories, not carbs? Can we still gain weight and fat from those carbs?

For some answers, I turned to a no-bull article about net carbs on Outside Magazine's website. He point out in reference to the idea of subtracking fiber and other non-digestable carbs from the total carbs:

Critics of this new math say that all of the above are still carbs, and any carbs ingested in an environment of elevated blood sugar will be stored as fat whether or not those carbs were guilty of raising the blood sugar themselves.

Next, I went to my favorite source for health information, WebMD. A search on their site for "net carbs" brought back lots of results including an article that explains more about what low-carb really means.

"Their rationale is that the glycerin and the sugar alcohols do not raise blood sugar as quickly or as high as the regular carbohydrates," says Heller, who is a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Medical Center. "Though this is true, they're choosing to ignore the fact that they still have calories."

They go on to say that consumers really need to read the labels on items since there is no legislation currently about what can be called "low-carb". But yes, those calories do, in fact count. They wrap it up with:

"During the low-fat craze, people ran out and bought low-fat Snackwell cookies," says Lindner. "Well, guess what? They have the same number of calories as Oreos and Chips Ahoy, and you're not going to lose weight if you keep eating those. It's the same thing with the low-carb products. They essentially have as many calories as the things they are meant to replace, and you're not going to lose weight if you don't eat fewer calories."

A while back I had something similar to say! Oh, and the irony of the WebMD article is that while I was viewing it, the ads on the page were for Low-Carb Total cereal.

Posted by jgrieves at May 20, 2004 07:47 AM