Can you help me with fiber information-Correct or not?

(yvette.kane) #1

I was following a net carb WOE. Someone mentioned that the only fiber I can subtract from carbohydrates to create a net is from vegetables. Not processed foods and labels.Is that right?. I am trying to lose weight, so any information you can give. Thank you.

(Tom Seest) #2

I’d just pick one thing to count, and work from there.

I picked Sugar when I started, and I just counted grams of sugar. Instead of using 20 as a number, I chose to target 10 because Sugar was my number.

But, it made the math much easier. I could count it with my fingers; no toes needed.

(Larry Lustig) #3

I don’t know where people come up wth all these rules.

You can subtract all fiber from the carbohydrate count. It either passes through without being digested or is used by gut microbes to make fatty acids.

(Tom Seest) #4

I need the Keto Rulebook, but I can’t find it on Kindle…Maybe a Fiber Rulebook is a better target.

(Guardian of the bacon) #5

@Brenda burned it at the stake…or was that with the steak?

Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?

(Tom Seest) #6

@Brenda does not burn steak. She doesn’t even cook it.

So, it must have been burned at the stake…

(yvette.kane) #7

It was on a Keto FB site. That is why I needed clarity

(Guardian of the bacon) #8

Great point.

(Guardian of the bacon) #9

I don’t believe in hard and fast rules. 2ketodudes has often recommended 20g as a starting point. Some use net, others use total.

Are you successful losing now? If so keep doiing what’s working. If you stall out or you are not losing then you may need to tighten things up a bit. We all have to tweak to fit our own lifestyle.

(I want abs... olutely all the bacon) #10

keep-calm-and-eat-raw-meat.png600Ă—700 392 KB

(yvette.kane) #11

What does this have to do with fiber count? Am I missing something?

(yvette.kane) #12

What does this have to do with fiber count?

(Larry Lustig) #13

The conversation got a little off track because people were ragging on the idea of lots and lots of rules for what’s keto and what isn’t. That transitioned to talking about the (fictional) Keto Rules Book which is a particular pet peeve of one of our admins (Brenda Zorn) and from there to whether or not she eats raw meat (which she does).

The answer to your question is that, broadly speaking, all fiber can be subtracted from the carb count to get the net carbohydrate content of any food.

I should also add, however, that some people don’t subtract fiber and count their carbohydrates by total content finding that they need to maintain a lower total carbohydrate intake to stay in ketosis.

(Richard Morris) #14

yeah it can be confusing because people have all sorts of rules - some make sense and some are pretty arbitrary,

Let’s see if I can break it down. To be in ketosis we need to have to make glucose. So to make us have to make glucose we just need to eat so little of the foods that are digested into glucose (sugar and starch). These are sometimes collected together in a term called Carbohydrates - but there are some things that are Carbohydrates that we can’t turn into glucose … this we call fibre.

So if you look at a Nutritional info panel on a can of food, the Carbohydrates will tell you how many of all 3 are in the food, but you really only care about the ones you turn into glucose. So that is why you can take the Carbohydrate number and subtract the Fibre number and get a rough guide of how much glucose this is going to mean for you.

The other thing worth mentioning is that we all have different tolerances for how much glucose will kick us out of ketosis. For some people that amount of glucose that stops us having to make more could be like 50g of glucose, and for those of us who are quite diabetic that could be like 5g. We chose 20g as a rule because that will get most people making ketones.

Finally you will find people on the web who say you can subtract the fibre from vegetables but not from atkins candy bars — they are just expressing their personal judgement in favour of you eating your veges and not candy bars,

But y’know for the first couple of months I ate atkins bars, and I still lost like 70 lbs and cured Diabetes. I don’t eat them much anymore because I don’t like the taste of them - I can barely tolerate quest bars. But if having an occasional treat helps you stay on your plan … I say go for it.

(yvette.kane) #15

Thank you. That is the help I needed.

(yvette.kane) #16

Thank you Richard. Is it fair to say that if you find out through trial and error that your body handles the higher carb load without weight gain, you should or could stay in the higher range? So you can have more variety?

#17

I believe @erdoke advocates this as a general rule of thumb since highly processing foods may break down the fiber to make it more digestible. And we all know that food-label-writers can play tricks with the FDA rules to make their product appear to have a more favorable content. Soluble and insoluble fiber, for example, are all labeled as “fiber” (U.S.) even though one is absorbed by the gut and the other passes through - in whatever study group they used.

(Larry Lustig) #18

My understanding is that water-soluble fiber is processed by the gut into fatty acids. So it counts as calories, since you wind up metabolizing it but does not count as carbohydrate since it doesn’t metabolize to glucose.

That’s a potential problem but, if true, we really can’t rely on reading labels to get carb counts at all.

(Gabor Erdosi) #19

On a bad day I’d probably say that if it has a label, you are screwed. On a good day however, I call your attention to the fact that it is not fiber per se that is protective to some extent against accelerated digestion, but the original structure of whole food.
How you convert this knowledge to daily eating practices is fully up to you.

#20

Could be. I think sometimes the processing can make formerly inaccessible fibers more accessible. And powders are more bioavailable than whole foods.

It all boils down to individual reactions to foods in the long run. I’d think of it as advice rather than a “rule”, since there is no Rulebook. :wink: