Well, am absolutely flattened. Reading thru these messages this morning & noticed a lady counting the carbs in spices? "No way" I said. Checked with FitDay, and OMG!! Even Black Pepper? Too frightened to check out the salt. LOL.

Would it be right that :
1 onion = 6 carbs
1 tomato = 6 carbs

Back to the drawing board for me. No wonder I've only lost 800g this week. Had 2 chicken curries.

Cheers...Pam

Hi Pamlyn!

Same thing happened to me! Groung pepper, garlic powder, cumin... carby! Salt is 0 carb.
viv

I know, I was floored myself. I love cinnamon and put it on EVERYTHING, and was suprised to find out it has carbs!!!

According to Fitday, 1 small onion has 4.6 effective carbs, and in Dr. Atkins book 1 medium onion has 7.5 effective carbs.

For 1 medium tomatoe, there are 4.4 effective carbs: small has about 3.2 effective carbs.

Remember, you can deduct fiber to come up with the the effective carbs (usually called net carbs). The Effective carbs are the the ones you need to count. Fiber carbs are considered freebies because they pass undigested through the body. Hopefully this helped. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.

I hape everything is going well for you .


Take care,
Grace

surprising enough that there are carbs in spices, ususally if the amt used is only 1/2 a teaspoon in 1 or 2 items a day i dont worry too much but when you start doing chicken curry, usually made with a spice 'blend' you have a whole new set of numbers, to help the spice blends make the sauce thick most have a cornstarch type carb and sugar in them, use a tablespoon for a serving, now you have carbs to count. dont forget the carbs in flavorings and extracts and my surprise- cider vinigar, i figured Balsamic would have some(its sweet) but cider? The good news it that by the time you are through w/ induction you will have developed some safe favorite foods that you know the counts in your head- it does get easier!

yup spices are plant material so of course they have carbs. for example a tsp of cinnamon has .6 net carbs....but 1 tsp of cinnamon for a serving of anything would be quite a bit, so I don't stress over it.

My main complaint about spices and extracts is that they do not put nutritional information on them. I have no idea how many carbs they have in them, because almost noone lists any nutritional information other than the ingridients. I wouldn't worry too much about spices as I use them conservatively.

But, the extracts worry me. The Vanilla Extract contains corn syrup and is 35% Alcohol (70 Proof). There is less than a teaspoon of it in most servings. But, I'd still like to know how many carbs it has.

According to Fitday, vanilla extract has 0.1 - 0.6g of carbs a teaspoon depending on the type you use. Imitation, made with alcohol, is the lowest. The amount is so small in most of these things it's not worth worrying to much about, but it's good to note since you may use them a lot. I recently realized my seasoned salt had sugar in it.... SALT, for heaven's sake!

Really? I never knew this. Is that different between brands?

I have no idea. That is just what the bottle I got says. Funniest thing is that it has more Alcohol than it has Carbs. Fitday lists a teaspoon as 1.44g of Alcohol. My understanding is that the body burns alcohol before fat. So, if you drank the whole bottle it would probably stall you for a day or so.

Some, not all, brands of vanilla extract contain sugar or corn syrups. A natural or gourmey grocery should have extracts without sugar. Frontier brand (sold as Whole Foods) has no sugar, also Penzey's (from penzeys.com).

All extracts contain alcohol, you can make your own by scraping a vanilla bean into a jar of vodka and letting it sit. I wouldn't worry about the amount of alcohol consumed in vanilla extract though. It's minimal compared to having a drink, and if the dish is cooked the alcohol will cook off anyway. I'm pretty sure the alcohol in an extract contains no carbs, the carbs I think come from the vanilla (and the sugar if it's there).



I never felt like "small" "medium" etc was a reliable measurement, so I always weighed everything. (This may give you some idea of why I stopped using Fitday, all that counting and weighing was driving me nuts)




I like Penzey's for spices too because they don't use fillers like that in their spice blends. Or better yet, make your own spice blends! It's easy to do and then you know exactly what's in them.

When I was using Fitday I wouldn't count spices unless I made something heavily spiced like chili or Indian food. If there was only a teaspoon or two I wouldn't bother counting them. When you think about it, two teaspoons of spices might add 1-1.5 carbs to a dish that serves 4, that's only .25 carb or so per serving. That's a bit obsessive even for me