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Originally Posted by TripSwitch
Thanks kaplods... I think my problem with this is that I'm finding it difficult to make this number of carbs that I've chosen (50g a day) translate into getting 25g's of fiber a day... So I have been supplementing... Time for me to do a little more research and see what veggies add up to 200 calories and deliver 25 grams of fiber... I really hope I can make the math work on this one
One thing when doing the math to consider, is that many (if not most) calorie counting resources include fiber calories in the calorie count. To me, this is absolutely ridiculous, because human beings cannot digest dietary fiber. For humans, it has no calories at all. However, it does technically "have" calories, because calories are essentially a measure of "burnability." If you're a cow or a horse, hay has calories, but to a human none of those calories will be absorbed.
The fact is, we don't know how many calories of a food are absorbed by the human body, so the calorie counting resources often count them all (which in the case of fiber is stupid, because NO HUMAN can digest any of them).
Even when it comes to non-fiber calories, not all calories are burned equally. Sugar alcohols and "resistant starch" are also carbohydrates that aren't completely digested (apparently some folks can digest them more completely than others). That means the same potato might provide one person with more calories than it would another person. How many could depend on how cold the potato is (cold potatoes contain more resistant starch than hot) or it could depend on the person's genetics or digestive system (some folks have a harder time digesting some fruit sugars than other people so the same apple could provide more calories to one person than to another).
It's because of these calorie-absorption discrepancies that many people believe that calorie-counting (at least without considering these factors) is outmoded.
You can double check the calorie-counting resources' math by seeing if the calorie counts add up correctly. If you multiply the fat grams by 9, the grams by 4 and the protein grams by 4 and add them all together you will get the total calories (including those from fiber.
What you'll find (I spent months doing the math) is that the math often doesn't add up correctly. Often the fiber calories will not be subtracted (making high fiber foods seem higher in calorie than they really are. Also, sometimes even with foods with no fiber, the math is still wrong. Sometimes the calorie count will be rounded up or down. Sometimes it won't even come close (I've seen this with oatmeal. It makes me wonder if it's "legal" to use a default calorie amount for given foods, because it seems that many oatmeal brands use the "default" calorie count of 130-140 whether or not the macros add up to that or not. For one brand, I calculated that the oatmeal contained fewer than 100 calories, but listed 140 on the label. Even subtracting the fiber calories wasn't enough to make the math work.