When you are counting carbohydrates for medical or dietary purposes, accurate calculations are essential to managing your diet. Many factors influence the effect of carbohydrates on your body, including dietary fiber, sugar alcohol and protein. Net carbohydrates are reduced by the amount of fiber and sugar alcohol in the food.
What Are Carbohydrates?
Carbohydrates are your body's energy source. Carbohydrates in your diet break down into sugar for distribution to your body's cells for energy. Your body digests different carbohydrate compositions at different rates, delivering sugar to your blood stream at varying rates based on what you eat.
Dietary Fiber and Carbohydrates
Dietary fiber content appears as part of the carbohydrate content on nutrition information labels. Your body cannot digest fiber, which prevents it from being turned to sugar and delivered to your bloodstream. Soluble fiber helps eliminate fats from your body, lowering your LDL cholesterol levels. Insoluble fiber flushes straight through your body, helping to promote regularity and digestive health. Because fiber is not digestible, there is no carbohydrate impact from consuming it.
Net Carbohydrates
When you measure the carbohydrate impact of your food, net carbohydrates are the most accurate representation of the carbohydrates that will impact your blood sugar. If there are 5 g or more of dietary fiber in each serving, reduce the overall carbohydrates by the dietary fiber grams. Anything less than 5 g does not represent a substantial difference, so you do not need to do anything if there is less than 5 g per serving. For example, if there are 6 g of dietary fiber in a serving that contains 28 g of carbohydrates, your net carbohydrates are 22 g.
Considerations
When you calculate carbohydrates for insulin dosage, proper calculation protects you from over-estimating your insulin dosage and risking a dangerous low blood sugar condition. Talk with your diabetic nutritionist about the amount of carbohydrate you should eat per meal, and balance your diet with dietary fiber to protect your digestive system. For meal plans that stipulate a low-carb diet, reducing the overall grams of carbohydrates by dietary fiber may allow you to add more to your daily meals while still keeping your carbohydrates below the requirement.
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