I’ve got some monk fruit sweetener and it says that there are 4 grams carbs per serving yet it claims zero calories. The carbs are erythritol. If 4 grams of sugar had 16 calories, 1 gram of carb has 4 calories, why wouldn’t this monk fruit sweetener have the same calories as sugar?
In: Biology
What brand of sweetener are you using, because monk fruit sweetener shouldn’t have any carbs, and certainly shouldn’t have that many carbs in a single serving (usually one teaspoon)?
One teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams, pure carbohydrates. If monk fruit sweetener is not sugar, then it shouldn’t have the same number of carbs, so there is some trickery going on with your product.
A common way to get around the labelling is to use primarily Erythritol, or sugar alcohol, along with the monk fruit extract (which is more for flavoring)
The erythritol isn’t digested into the body and passes in your stool, and has a lower gram/calorie ratio than regular sugar, so they can get away with putting zero calories on the label, as it provides fewer than one calorie per serving.
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