This short story begins with calories…

Calories are made up of macronutrients and the macronutrients are protein, carbs and fats…alcohol is also technically a macro, but we’re just going to focus on food for now.

Protein contains 4 calories per gram.

Carbs contain 4 calories per gram.

Fats contain 9 calories per gram.

In regards to protein and fat that’s as far as it goes, that’s all that you need to know about their makeup in terms of total calories, however carbs are a tad bit different and the reason that they’re different is due to 2 things…

One is fiber and the other is something called sugar alcohols, which are not regular table sugar as in the stuff that some folks add to their coffee and what they bake treats with, sugar alcohols have a slightly different chemical structure.

You may have seen sugar alcohols on some ingredient labels and they have funky sounding names like erythritol, lactitol, mannitol, maltitol, sorbitol, xylitol among a few others.

Now we just covered that carbs contain 4 calories per gram, but it turns out that fiber and these things called sugar alcohols that are carbohydrates only contain about 2-3 calories per gram due to the way in which they’re digested.

25g of pure table sugar has 100 calories.

A medium sized apple also has about 25g of carbohydrates as well, however about 5g of those 25g are fiber, meaning…

Technically the apple has closer to 90 or 95 calories in it due to that 5g of fiber because instead of the regular 4 calories per gram, that 5g of fiber specifically only contains 2-3 calories per gram…a very small difference, but a difference nonetheless.

Now like we mentioned sugar alcohols are similar to fiber in that they don’t contain 4 calories per gram either, they also contain closer to 2-3 calories per gram and therefore companies add fiber and sugar alcohols to products because they reduce the calories slightly and therefore they can market them as lower calorie options, but more importantly and what’s more misleading is that companies take advantage of this term called ‘net carbs’ which is a bit of a labeling loophole.

Net carbs refer to the total grams of carbohydrates in a product minus the grams of fiber and/or sugar alcohols, so for example…

Smart sweets, these are quote on quote ‘low calorie gummy candies’ and I get asked about these things all the time and I don’t know how they’ve done it or how they’re allowed to do it, but their calorie labels are just straight up wrong!

A package of smart sweets says on the label that it contains 100 calories and when we look at the breakdown of those calories, it reads…

0g of protein.

0g of fat.

42g of carbs.

 13g of those 42g of carbs are fiber.

We mentioned before that each gram of carbs has 4 calories and 42 x 4 = 168.

Now to be fair, we only absorb 2-3 calories per gram of fiber, so if we account for the 2-3 calories per gram of each gram of fiber, let’s say it’s 2 calories to be generous…we still land at 142 calories per package and it’s labeled as 100 calories.

Again, I don’t know how Smart Sweets gets away with this or how this loophole is even a thing because it’s just straight up false! They subtracted the calories from fiber completely out of this product instead of accounting for the 2-3 calories per gram that we still absorb from fiber.

Great marketing…fair enough, but super misleading.

Now you might thinking, ‘Marcus, 42 calories, who cares dude…you’re always talking about focusing on the basics and the big rocks’ and you’re right…the thing is that 42 calories equates to this product label being over 40% off because the package is listed to only contain 100 calories, that’s a massive difference, for example…

That’s equivalent to something having 1420 calories in it, but only listing 1000 calories on the label…that’s huge, 42% which is a generous number by the way because we multiplied by the lower end i.e. 2 calories instead of 3…so, take that for what it’s worth.

There are other products that take advantage of this loophole and the easiest way to find out is simply by looking at calorie labels and doing a little bit of math…

If you tally up the protein and carbs and multiply them by 4 and take the total grams of fat and multiply it by 9 you get a number. If the product has fiber and or sugar alcohols in it and they don’t account for at least 2-3 calories per gram of each of these things, they’re using this loophole.

Now the nice thing about single ingredient whole foods that I talk about on the pod all the time is, this isn’t an issue. When you look at a bag of apples and breakdown the calories, they all add up, they don’t subtract out the fiber and do this misleading funky calculation, so if you just eat whole food…this net carbs dealio doesn’t even matter!

Now if you do choose to eat these products, should you account for ‘net carbs’ i.e. the minimal difference that fiber and sugar alcohols make calorie wise…no.

You’re just chasing your tail, it’s pointless and it’s never going to be the difference between getting results and not getting results so in short, I wouldn’t recommend accounting for net carbs, just focus on totals.

Now there is another really important factor to consider in regards to fiber, sugar alcohols and these alternative food products specifically and that is digestion…

Too much fiber and even a small amount of sugar alcohols are both notorious for messing with digestion because there’s no free lunch…most folks just don’t tolerate a whole bunch of added fiber and/or sugar alcohols very well and again…

If you’re not consuming these funky products, sugar alcohols becomes a non-issue because they don’t even exist in single ingredient whole food. Fiber isn’t much of an issue either unless you’re eating large amounts of things like beans and legumes, but everyone knows that overdoing those lead to digestive upset…shit, there’s a whole song about how beans make folks gassy so…common knowledge right there!

So, if you choose to eat these items, be mindful of the fact that you may be consuming more calories than you think due to this labeling loophole, as well as how you personally digest both added fiber and sugar alcohols.

Thanks for swinging by, I hope that you found this article useful and if so, feel free to share it…I’d love that J

Lastly, be sure to let me know if you have any questions at all!