Is this bacon ok?


(Jeb Bower) #5

Key words to look at is “CURED WITH:” All that means is that a big slab of pork was soaked in a brine that had all that stuff in it, which includes sugar. It gets rinsed off and then sliced. The reason it shows 0g sugar is probably because the amount of sugar left on that bacon really is less than 1g.

While it sounds easy enough, good luck finding any cured bacon that doesn’t have sugar listed on the label. Even if it isn’t labeled as “Sugar Cured”, chances are pretty good that the brine still had sugar in it.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #6

There appear to be numerous options. :slightly_smiling_face:

Sugar Free Pork Bacon Slices

There is no sweetener in US Wellness Meats’ Sugar Free Pork Bacon Slices. There is also no white sugar, brown sugar, honey powder, agave, turbinado sugar, MSG, nitrates, or nitrites.
Ingredients: pork, sea salt, natural flavor (from hickory smoking)

Pederson’s Sugar Free Bacon

Pederson Sugar Free Bacon is smoked uncured Bacon made from pork that is humanely raised. Minimally processed, no preservatives, no artificial ingredients, no added nitrates or nitrites (except those naturally occurring in celery powder), no gluten, no lactose, no MSG, no added sweeteners. Paleo and Whole 30 approved!
Ingredients: Pork, water, salt, vinegar, celery powder.

Incredible hickory smoked bacon, now with no added sugar

Ingredients:Pork, Water, Vinegar & Lemon Juice Concentrate, Salt, Cultured Celery Juice.

Applegate Naturals No Sugar Bacon

Ingredients: Pork, Water, Sea Salt. Contains Less Than 2% Of The Following: Celery Powder.

Naked Bacon No Sugar Added

Love bacon, but want to pass on the sugar? We have you covered with our No Sugar Added flavor. After all, you don’t have to have sugar to have a treat.

Wegman’s

Ingredients: Pork, Water, Contains 2% or less of each: Salt, Vinegar, Citrus Extracts, Rosemary Extract, Pomegranate Extract.

Of course, you can always make your own bacon!


Curing bacon - its generally cured with sugar, salt, - how does the sugar not translate to a lot of carbs?
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

The USDA food composition database shows no sugar content in that particular product (I used the UPC to be sure), even per kilogram, much less for a serving size of two slices. In fact, it shows no carbohydrate at all. I think it’s safe to eat.

Normally, however, I assume that if sugar is listed as an ingredient but shows 0 g/serving, the actual content is 0.4999999999999 g/serving. In this case, it appears I would have been wrong to do so.


(Scott) #8

I only have one for breakfast…with my two eggs, HWC, cheese, butter and sausage.


(chad) #9

Great. I’m going to look for bacon with out sugar in the ingredients next time but I have a few packs I’d like to finish off so they don’t go to waste. Glad there safe to eat tho


(Full Metal KETO AF) #10

In the US it’s <0.9g. can be rounded down.
The FDA considers less than one gram “insignificant nutritionally “.

Chad I highly recommend downloading or using an online tracker. Cronometer is what I use and it’s pretty popular with people who track here. The beauty of tracking is making yourself aware of just how many carbs are really in your daily food. As an example your bacon says zero carb but lists sugar in the ingredients. Quite a bit of that sugar caramelizes in your pan as bacon residue after cooking. But with the tracking this is what you get;

Sometimes you can run a brand specific choice but I found the Kroger claim unbelievable as it came out zero carb for 1 pound. The generic listing seems more honest to me in this case. So there are carbs in bacon, eggs and most processed meats like salami and pepperoni but they are mostly pretty low. A tracking app will let you know how many carbs there are in a serving size of your choice. They are free to download and use in basic versions which is all you need. Good luck Chad.

:cowboy_hat_face:


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #11

@David_Stilley I can’t agree more strongly! Carbs are ubiquitous even in stuff you least expect it to be. I can’t imagine how the people who advocate not weighing food portions possibly know how many carbs they’re eating. I bet they’d be shocked to discover how many they’re actually eating by guestimating, especially if they’re relying on ‘cups’ and ‘tablespoons’. 20 grams is a mind-numbing small amount.


(Full Metal KETO AF) #12

@amwassil Apparently I was mistaken about the FDA rounding down policy, I did read that misinformation somewhere on this forum…:scream:


(chad) #13

Is crono better or worse than myfitnesspal


(Little Miss Scare-All) #14

Man, I wish I liked bacon. :confounded:


(Andi loves space, bacon and fasting. ) #15

Thank you for these links. I live in an affluent health-conscious part of California and I haven’t yet found bacon in the markets here that don’t have added sugar. I can even taste the sugar when I cook with the bacon fat. I will be placing an order from one of these companies soon. Thanks again!!


(Full Metal KETO AF) #16

I have never used My Fitness Pal, Cronometer was recommended by some here and I like using it. It’s a free download or you can look at the online version at Cronometer.com
They have a pretty extensive data base and a lot of programmability for your personal needs. I imagine Fitness Pal is similar . Are you using that? :cowboy_hat_face:


(Full Metal KETO AF) #17

Even @Sharon_E and @Acnickel are eating bacon now, What’s the problem? I’ve seen you eating the potato chip like bacon at McD’s! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :cowboy_hat_face:


(Little Miss Scare-All) #18

Lmao! I think I get in the mood for it, I eat it and then remember I don’t enjoy it that much. 1 slice and I’m good.

This made me laugh :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:


(Shane) #19

I don’t weigh anything I eat, though I don’t actually advocate that.

I’m mainly carnivore, so 20g of carbs is a fair bit. I do watch out for things like bacon and dairy which can add up, but I don’t actually count them. What I do is test my BG after eating new/different foods and see how I react and make changes if necessary.
Here’s what happened about 6-7 weeks ago when I ate 3 sausages that claimed to be 0.7% carbs, the first spike that put me above the (alleged) healthy range followed 4 hours later by a large meal with veggies that hardly moved it. The sausages should have had no more than 2g of carbs total.

bg-saus-part

I can (and do) regularly eat 1 to 1 1/2 frying pans of bacon at a time and get a response like the 2nd/3rd spikes. What I’ve found here is the cheaper the bacon, the more sugar used, but I’d have to eat an awful lot of it to raise my BG, which to me is more important than claimed carb content…maybe I’l do a bacon chart this arvo, it’s close enough to brecky time.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #20

@kingfisher Thanks. I’m glad you’re the one donating blood to this data gathering. I’m betting it doesn’t take many carbs to move that needle (pun intended :slightly_smiling_face:). I have wondered, however, if we really need to be much concerned about staying sub-20 grams per day. The spikes caused by the sausage in your graph petered out after a few hours. So I wonder if staying sub-20 per meal is sufficient. In a few months time I am getting one of these which promises to measure the ratio of fat/carb burn in real time. Then I can test this myself. In the meantime, if you feel like donating the blood…


(Shane) #21

I told myself I was cutting back on the blood tests, Oh well. I prefer to trust absolute results rather than apps and maybe dodgy nutrition panels that guess what the results could be.
I’d have to get a bit more serious in my tests, but I think that anything even close to 20g of carbs for me will show up as raised BG into the follow day. I need to do more carnivore tests.
The type of carbs and what they are eaten with may make a big difference, and maybe how carb depleted I am. The graph I’m about to post here was after 21-23 hour IF and my BG was slowly dropping so there should have been plenty of empty carb parking spaces available :slight_smile:

I remember reading that and my inner nerd would probably like one. As much as I like numbers and measurable results, though, I think that if measuring and keeping records becomes a chore it could put people (me) off. Maybe part of the reason why cal restricted diets nearly always fail. This time around I didn’t even note a start date or plotted weight loss. I just know that I’ve lost around 40kg over the last ~9 months, have pages of NSV’s and feel 20 years younger.


(Shane) #22

You never know until you give it a go.
At great personal sacrifice, I just forced myself to eat a pan (100g) of bacon followed by another pan of bacon and 6 eggs 1 1/2 hours later. The things I do for science and my own peace of mind. Mine claims to be 3% carbs. Seems like a lot. The last lot I finished a couple of days ago was 1.5%
anyway today’s test shows that, for me, bacon and eggs are ok in moderation.
I ate the bacon around 21-23 hours fasted (since dinner yesterday)
The first spike was 2 hours after the bacon.
I forgot to wash my hands on the bigger spike, but in the overall scheme of things, even that spike is fairly tame. I’m very happy with my BG level all day today as well.

Full disclosure. The top pics are the actual first batch of bacon, but the eggs in the 3rd photo were today’s, but the second batch in the 4th pic used eggs that were up to 3 or 4 days old.


I’ll try iffy stuff if it’s something I really want to eat and test afterwards to see how it went. Then incorporate it into future meals or stay away from it in the future, like I did with those sausages from earlier.
That’s enough testing for me. Any more finger pricks and I might not be pickin a banjer or me nose for a while.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #23

I believe it works like this: amounts under 0.5 g/serving can be listed as 0 g, amounts under 1.0 g/serving can be listed as “less than 1 g.” This gives the manufacturer an incentive to choose a serving size that permits them to do this.

My coping strategy is to assume that 0 g means 0.499999999 g, and “less than 1” means 0.99999999 g. That makes sure I stay on the safe side of tracking my carb intake. (Strictly speaking, I don’t track, but I do keep an eye on things.)

European/British/everywhere-else-in-the-world-but-North-American law provides that in addition to whatever amounts are listed per serving, the nutrition label must also show the amounts per 100 grams of the product. So that kind of eliminates that particular species of trickery.


(PJ) #24

Sorry to say that alas, turns out this is not evidence. I’ve used the USDA database online almost religiously for a decade. It will tell you, for example, that an entire cup of, say, Montreal Seasoning, has 0 everything. Although salt does not have anything really (it’s a mineral), black pepper does, red pepper flakes do, caraway seed does, onion does, garlic does, paprika does, and I promise an entire cup of the stuff certainly does. Same for say, granulated garlic.

There are quite a lot of these things that USDA says zero on even for mass amounts. I usually go to USDA if a label has a tiny serving size that allows them to say zero and I know it’s not – but sometimes, the USDA is not helpful in that regard. It’s almost like they take the label, which itself is legit according to labeling laws, and then mathematically scale it. Which of course, is not accurate, when the serving size has allowed those numbers to be zero. Sometimes it has seemingly real numbers… sometimes not.

Edited to add: although really, even on my best bacon days (Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!) eating up to 10 slices (the most I can bake just-above-oven-bottom on my nonstick ceramic oversized sheet, oh how I love that thing) is incredibly hard for me, and I have almost no satiating limit for the stuff. And even that much, with <1 carb per 2 slices, is just not going to be much – and is likely to be very slow to digest given bacon is more fat than protein.

When I was new to lowcarb I was tediously picking tiny carrot shreds out of my salad mix. I got a micro-gram scale so I could weigh tiny amounts of produce like hot peppers more precisely, for the USDA value to the second decimal. I may have been a tad over-obsessive. (Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing! Yeah!) I see that in other people who are new, though – that sometimes they are probably more concerned than needed over the little things.

The best strategy for the inexactitude of labels and weights is just to eat a little below your target ECC.

(After a few weeks, it might help new people to know that ketogenic low carb is not necessarily the same as atkins ‘induction’ or internet-popularized-‘keto’ of <=20ecc, but whatever your body can stay ketogenic with, which for the majority of people I’ve encountered is more like 30-35 (sometimes more for very large people) too. And yes, yes, the 20 number is required for a few people, and “is low enough to be sure to work for everyone to get them to keto,” but that does not mean it’s the best number for everyone. I know a lot of people who feel crappy on constant 20, but feel much better on about 30-32 or so – particularly older women).

When in doubt about something’s carbs, undereat from your total that day (e.g. if your total is 20, eat around 14). Then if you’re wrong about something being 0, the difference probably isn’t going to hurt. :smiley:

PJ