Tamarian :thup:

You seem to be the one to thank for putting that wonderful tool on the site, so :wave: thanks for giving us that cool Hidden Carb Investigator. I use it a lot. I do have a question though concerning the settings that can be used to refine the process, such as dairy products, beverages , etc.

It seems to give a rather large range of results depending on which of these is selected. Is this supposed to happen? For example I ran a Keto shake through using the default setting and got 2.35 grams; using the beverage setting it gave me 8.85 or thereabouts; the snack setting was about 5.5.

Calories: 200
Fat 10g
protein 24
carbs 3
(I ignored the fiber box; I'm so proud of myself!)
Since the ingredients were exactly the same each time, just the 'setting' being different, why would the resulting carbs have such a large range? What setting would you use? Is it safe to ignore that as someone advised me?

Just curious. Cajun Boy who misses my Gumbo!!!

My parmesan/romano grated cheese label says one thing, but Carboydrate counter shows something way different.

Mine (per 2 tsp) shows 0 carbs, but after I put it through the hiddern carbs tool it came up with .83

The parmesan listed when using the carb counter tool is 3.74 carbs .73. (per cup).

Got any ideas?

The reason you see such a difference is that energy factors are different depending on the food item. Carbs in nuts and seeds yields different energy values that carbs in dairy etc. Same for fat and protein.

For best result, select the category that matches the first ingredient in the ingredients list.

Wa'il

In both cases when looking for carb count for parmesan (from the label - and from the generic "parmesan" which appears in the database files, I used Dairy for the carb count. They should have come up closer. But it was like comparing apples to oranges.

Maybe I made it more confusing that it should have been.

1) I have a bottle of parmesan. According to the label it has 0 carbs per 2 tsp. According to the hidden carb finder thingy, it has .8 per 2 tsp.

2) I looked up parmesan using the carb finder. It says it has 3.74 carbs per Cup. According to the hidden carb finder, it has .73 g per Cup.

We are talking about a huge difference. Looking at the carb counter shows .8/tsp vs .73/C

Which is right, the carb counter, the database, the label? Or do I give up the whole thing and stick to something other than parmesan cheese.

Some labelling laws permit you to truncate values, so you can report 0g as long as it is less than 1g. Some manufacturers do this and some don't.



The carb counter shows 3.74g of carbs per 100g of cheese. Not per cup (assuming we are using the same carb counter - the one on this site).

What data are you putting into the hidden carb counter? Are you sure that the 0.73g isn't the HIDDEN carbs as opposed to the total carbs.

Round 3
 

If you click on Parmesan, you will see the breakdown. Although the screen says 100g you will see at the top of the page is says cup. If you click on cup to recalculate (which is very misleading because it should default to 100g) you will still find it comes up the same (perhaps their are 100g to a cup? I dunno.

So, with that confusion I clicked on tablespoon. That came up with .19. The carb finder actually lowers it to .17 (If I am reading this correctly.)

So, there are three teaspoons to a tablespoon. My bottle uses tablespoons as the measure. To be exact, 2.

Now let's compare


Database Db Carb Finder Bottle Db Carb Finder
.19 Tbsp .17 Tbsp 0 tsp .83 tsp

Knowing the problem with the 0, lets only compare the carb finder information.

.17 Tbsp vs .83 tsp. Since there are three tsp to one tablespoon, it appears that my parmesan may have .17 grams of carbs......or .83 x 3 which equals 24.9!

Do you see my delema. I don't think the database is wrong, but I have to bring this to someone's attention because the discrepency is sooooooo big. I looked on the contents on bottle and it says it has:

Parm cheese (part cultured skim milk), salt, enzymes...and more. Do you think the part cultured skim milk could create this problem? I would think all parmesan cheese would say this. I only have one bottle, but I will check in the store.

As Kelly Bundy would say..."I'm at the horns of an enema."

Everyone seems so concerned about Carb intake/hidden carbs. I use a carb/sugar inhibitor from fitamerica.com and it turns a 30% portion of your empty starches into dietary fiber and curbs your cravings, too. My advice is dont wear the small stuff. Just enjoy in modration, exercise, and check out what I'm talking about. Its made from kidney bean..soo..all natural.

Yes, well, the packages say they work, of course, but how do we know for sure? If they said, "We think this helps with reducing your starch absorbtion," nobody would buy them! ;)

I for one, am leary, although I do have a product that is similar with Fenugreek extract, gymnema sylvestre extract, absorbative vegetable fiber (northern white kidney bean extract) glucosol, and Super-CitriMax. BUT, do I take one of these and go, "I can eat whatever I want tonight." No way. I take one occasionally if I am going out to a restaurant (like Mexican) and think, "If I do cheat, than hopefully this will help a bit." I wouldn't bet my bottom dollar that these pills do everything they say they do...


-Shelly

I would actually be willing to bet a fair amount of money that they do absolutely nothing or, at most, an insignificant something.

If I came up with a pill that made a person lose 3 pounds a month without changing how they eat or exercise that product would be bigger than Viagra - a LOT bigger.

So take a person eating the USDA recommended 300g of carbs per day. That's roughly 1200 calories from carbs. Now I somehow magically turn 30% of them into dietary fiber (sounds like snake oil to me). That's 360 calories a day gone - poof. That's three pounds a month.

Proving their claim is trivially easy - a very simple double-blind study could be conducted on something like this very easily and inexpensively. So why haven't they done it?

Parmesan Cheese
 

These are the numbers from the Carbohydrate Counter on this site:

Parmesan Cheese
1 Tbsp => 0.19g carbs (22.79cal/1.5g fat/2.08g protein)
100g => 3.74g carbs (455.81cal/30.02g fat/41.56g protein)
1 cup => 3.74g carbs (same as above)

The first question is whether there is an obvious error above or if there really are 100g of parmesan cheese in a cup. Well, there are 2 Tbsp in an ounce (volume measure) and eight ounces in a cup, so there are 16 Tbsp in a cup. So 16*0.19g = 3.04g. So this is reasonably close.

If I look in Netzer's book it shows:

Parmesan Cheese
1 Tbsp => 0.2g carbs
1 oz => 1.1g carbs

The first line: 3.2g of carbs per 1 cup of cheese.

The second line: This is a dry ounce. There are 28.4g in a dry ounce so 100g would have (100g)*(1.1g/oz)*(1oz/28.4)=3.87g per 100g of cheese.

So 100g is roughly 1 cup. There may be an error in how many grams are in a cup for grated parmesan cheese in the database, but if there is it isn't having a huge effect.

Using the Hidden Carb Tool and the 1 Tbsp data I get a total of 0.17g of carbs (the same that you did) which is well within the uncertainty level for the data.

Using the Hidden Carb Tool and the 1 Cup data I get a total of 3.33g of carbs which is well in general agreement with the 3.04g and the 3.74g above. Keep in mind that the worst case difference here - 0.7g of carbs - is in a whole cup of cheese. So 2.7cal out of a total of 456 calories. That's one half of one percent. The basic data itself simply isn't consistent or accurate enough to worry about things on that level.

Before I can go any further, I need to know exactly what data you put in to get the 0.83g of carbs per teaspoon. But I think you will find that the descrepancy is based almost completely in the rounding of the labelled values. The fact that calorie values are almost always rounded to 10g (or 5g on low calorie servings) is enough to throw off the carb results by a full gram. The fact that fat content is almost always rounded to a whole gram is enough to through off the carb results by a couple of grams.

Yes, according to the USDA:

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bi...%2c%20gratedxyz

A cup of grated parmesan weighs 100 grams.

Thanks for crunching the numbers Bill! :)

Wa'il

Re: Round 3
 

Yes, this is a software bug :( This will happen with any food selection where a cup weighs 100 grams.

It has now been corrected. :)

Wa'il

Thanks for you indepth response.

The bottle says:
Serving Size 2 tsp (5g)
Calories: 25
Fat: 1.5g
Carb: 0g
Protein: 2

I looked over all the bottles in the store for parmesan and they all had the same numbers.

This comes up with .83 for 2 tsp (5g), so if you can figure this out, please help. A sprinkle of parmesan is no big deal, but I have a recipe which I use 1/2 cup of parmesan. That either is less than 2 carbs (according to most references), or 8 plus (according to the bottle). I could sure use someones help.

Use the numbers from the database in this instance. The basic problem is that you are working with numbers for a small quantity that have been rounded. Any residual error from that rounding is magnified by a factor of 24 when you go from 2 tsp to 1/2 cup.

Let's change those numbers a bit and see the impact they have.

Suppose the thing had 23 calories but they rounded it to 25.

Suppose the thing has 1.7g of fat but they rounded it to 1.5g.

Suppose the thing has 2.4g of protein but they rounded it to 2.0g

Now run the Hidden Carb Tool and you get that it has -0.6g of carbs in it.

The problem is in the data on the package label - not in the carb calculator. It's a classic case of garbage in - garbage out.

Thanks so much for clearing this up. I didn't really think the carb counter was off, but there was a flaw in the way I was using it. The flaw is not the fault of the carb finder, but in the rounding. I see that now. So I will keep in mind that any portion which is small could be greatly skewed when we increase the quantities.

I can breath easier now. Thanks again for your patience on this.