What special problems do lowcarbers have?

Question: Why do lowcarbers have special problems?
The law and regulations requiring nutrition panels on food labels were implemented as part of a campaign to get people to eat less fat. As a result, certain aspects of the law are less helpful and/or accurate for diets with a different focus. Furthermore, there seems to be less enforcement of the existing regulations with regard to lowcarb products, which leaves even label-educated lowcarbers vulnerable to misinformation.

Question: In what way are lowfat-oriented regulations a problem for lowcarbers?

In the long run, the biggest problem is that they lead us to expect greater overall accuracy than we get. This can be a dangerous expectation for anyone on a non-lowfat diet.

The idea behind the regulations is that by standardizing formats and serving sizes, people could compare products and buy the most-healthful choices. However, the regulators operated in a one-size-fits-all world. By selecting fat as more important than the other nutrients, the others got much shorter shrift. Fat content is reported more accurately, carbohydrate content less accurately than other nutrients (as explained in the main FAQ). Serving sizes are often not useful to us.


Question: How do serving sizes affect lowcarbers?

Our eating patterns are not according to the current paradigm, so we routinely use different serving sizes. If the serving size reported on the label is too large, we are required to do arithmetic, not something most Americans enjoy. But, even worse, when it is too small, we lose a lot of information because of rounding.

Heavy (or whipping) cream is a perfect example. For some reason, it is required to be reported in one tablespoon servings. (Is anyone able to whip only one tablespoon at a time?) Looking at the nutrition label for 36% butterfat cream, it correctly reports carbohydrates as "0g" even though one cup cream (8 fluid ounces) of 36% butterfat cream contains 6.6g carbohydrate. There are 16 tablespoons in a cup so when you divided 6.6 by 16, you get 0.4g carb per tablepoon which rounds to zero. So, when lowcarbers use the package label for information, while using cream in larger amounts, their carbohydrate calculations are wrong. The problem is not dishonesty but the way the regulations were written.


Question: My cream lists 1g carb. Does this mean the manufacturer was more honest?

Probably not -- it is not dishonest or less-honest to follow the rules. Cream is an agricultural commodity that has to meet a number of standards, so one brand is unlikely to differ from another unless the dairy explains otherwise, for example cream that comes from only one type of cow. More likely, your cream may have less than 36% butterfat and contain other additives to help it whip. That combination may increase the carb count enough to require rounding up to 1g. However, unless it is sweetened, it is unlikely to differ significantly -- but read your label carefully.

Question: Are there other other problems?

The main FAQ notes that foods that contain only insignificant amounts of nutrients considered important under the law need not have labels. Sadly for us, those "insignificant amounts" tend to be carbs which are insignificant only in the context of a high-carbohydrate diet. The fact that a cup of coffee or tea contains a mere gram of carbohydrate is insignificant to people who routinely consume more than 300g per day -- but a few cups of these supposedly no-calorie, presumably no-carb, beverages can represent a big chunk of our carb allowance. Spices, herbs, extracts, etc. are not required to have nutrition labels but can also add up for us.

Question: Why is there little enforcement?

It appears that, unless health claims are made, underreporting carbs is not against the rules (as explained in the main FAQ). Carbs are officially a "good" nutrient, so while regulations require that the contents of the package contain at least 80% of what is reported on the nutrition label, they are silent about what happens when the manufacturer is overly-generous.

Question: How is this a problem?

There are now millions of people buying lowcarb products, a fact that has not escaped a number of manufacturers. In their rush to enter this market, some manufacturers have not bothered to make real lowcarb products. Much of our modern food manufacturing know-how depends on using sugars and starches, so they try to get by with modifying existing products. Some, realizing that accurate food labels would belie their advertising, have chosen to ignore the label regulations even while using the Nutrition Facts format. Some pre-subtract the fiber, some fail to report entire classes of carbohydrates.

Lowcarb consumers are caught in a bind. We are offered information in a format that implies that the government stands behind it, but the government has little interest in monitoring it. This issue has become so serious that a group of lowcarbers went to the trouble of paying for independent lab tests which, sadly, confirmed that none of the products tested were as low in carbs as reported on their labels.

Question: What about health claims?

It is also difficult to get our concerns considered health claims. If a product is labelled as safe for ketosis, and it turns out to be too high carb, it's not clear that the FDA would consider that a health claim.

The bottom line is that we are pretty much on our own.

Source: http://www.expertfoods.com/FAQs/labels-lowcarbers.php