My brother tried explaining it to me, but I’m starting to think he doesn’t understand it either. *My* understanding is that net carbs is based on the digestable and non-digestable carbs in a good. So if it’s 5 grams, but you can’t digest 3, then it’s really only 2 grams of carbs. My brother is saying that as long as he eats fiber, he cns have carbs? Like he can eat pizza because he had a high-fiber vegetable with it. I’m starting to doubt either of us understand net carbs. What’s the deal? What exactly is a carb, and how do net carbs work?
In: Biology
Eating fiber doesn’t “cancel out” other carbs, it just doesn’t count towards your daily total. You can’t eat pizza and then cancel it out with fiber. Source: currently on keto and I would be eating pizza daily then downing fiber supplements if it worked that way.
Your brother is getting it mixed up i believe.
Fiber is part of carbs, just like sugar and starch.
But, unlike sugar and starch, your fiber is being digested differently so it basically doesn’t become sugar for energy, so its safe to consume(and dont count it for your daily carb intake) for a low carb diet like keto.
But if you eat the bread from pizza, it will still count normally.
Although now that i read this post, while i am having doubts and want to eat a pizza, i believe i am not mistaken. Maybe someone else could shed more light with details.
If you ate 100 grams of saw dust it’s almost all carbohydrates but not ones a human can digest so it’s listed as 100 grams of carbs but all nondigestable. But that isn’t like any put carbs that then let you eat some other carb and remove it. It’s just things that are carbohydrates but not the food kind
Net carbs = total carbs – fiber.
So a banana has approximately 28g of carbs and 3g of fiber. A banana has 25g of net carbs.
100g of raspberries has approximately 12g of carbs and 6g of fiber. 100g of raspberries has 6g of net carbs.
In keto you shouldn’t exceed 5% of your daily intake with carbs, or 25g (whichever comes first).
In the above examples, a banana is a bad idea on keto since your entire 25g of daily carbs is contained in a single food. However, 100g of raspberries might be a better option.
However, the best option for fruit on keto is an avocado. It has plenty of fat (which you have to eat 50-60% off on keto), and plenty of fiber. 100g of avocados contain approximately 2g of net carbs.
So your brother could eat 12 avocados throughout the day, or divide a banana into 12 pieces. They’d be the same net carbs.
Hope that helps.
Keto, and other low carb diets like South Beach, are based around getting your body to use fat as fuel and, in many cases, walking back a degree of insulin resistance that tends to come with years of a high sugar diet.
This is also why a number of no-cal sweeteners tend to be banned in these. They are so close to sugar that they generate a lot of the same bodily responses that sugar would, not just the sensation of sweetness.
For this, sugars and the complex carbs that can easily be broken down into sugars are the primary target foe reduction. There are other carbohydrates, chemically speaking, but they don’t all break down like that.
Mostly it’s dietary fiber, which is largely indigestible for humans but can be used to provide structure in recipes like pseudo-bread. You’ll also see keto marketed stuff using sugar alcohols sometimes which don’t get processed the same way as actual sugars or the things that break down into them.
Pizza is…really doubtful unless it’s a speciality thing? The crust is still carrying a lot of the “bad” carbs unless it’s one built not to, and even things like the sauce can wind up with a surprising amount of sugars depending on the brand.
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