Lowcarbezine!

Low Fat Foods Revisited

I have long scorned low fat packaged foods, knowing that many of them simply replaced the fat with sugar and chemicals - fat free salad dressings, for instance, tend to be nothing but spicy corn syrup, and fat free ice cream usually has more sugar than the super-premium kind. And of course, many low fat products are just plain nasty.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that Philadelphia Lite Cream Cheese actually has fractionally less carbohydrate than Philadelphia Regular Cream Cheese. I made this discovery when I went to buy cream cheese to try out a new cheesecake recipe (and a fine, fine recipe it turned out to be, by the way; see below!) and, in the spirit of inquiry that has long characterized my approach to food in general, and grocery shopping in particular, I read all of the cream and Neufchatel cheese boxes in the dairy case. (Neufchatel is, so far as I can tell, identical to lite cream cheese.) First, I learned that the store's own brand of cream cheese had 2 grams of carbohydrate per ounce, instead of 1 gram per ounce for the more expensive Philly, and the Neufchatel had the same. But the Philly Lite had "<1 g" of carbohydrate per ounce - not a big difference, but a difference nonetheless, and one in the lite cream cheese's favor.

So I bought the Philly Lite, and used it for my cheesecake, which was exceedingly yummy. I also used plain yogurt in place of the sour cream, after running the nutritional analysis and discovering that the substitution wouldn't add even 1 gram of carbohydrate per slice. I got a cheesecake with an excellent flavor and texture, with no more carbohydrate per serving than if I'd used the higher fat products. Further, the cheesecake ended up with 328 calories per slice instead of 407, or almost 20% fewer calories. Please note: This was not a low fat cheesecake! 73% of the calories in the cake came from fat. But it was, indeed, lower calorie than the full-fat version would have been, without being any higher carb.

It was a thought-provoking experience, to say the least.

Again, do not think I am advocating a low fat diet; I'm not. However, many low carbers have learned that they also need to keep an eye on calories, and in the context of a low carbohydrate diet, fat is the exandable-and-contractable fraction of our diet. What do I mean by that? Just this: We all have a certain number of grams a day of protein we must get - for most of us, that will be between 65 and 100 grams per day. Taking an intermediate figure, if your protein requirement for the day is 75 grams, at 4 calories per gram, that's just 300 calories that are going to come from protein. (This, of course, doesn't include any fat calories that come along with those protein calories.)

We also have a certain allotment of carbohydrate we ought to be getting every day, and most of us aren't willing to give up a single gram - nor should we, since those vegetables, fruits, nut and seeds, etc, bring a lot of variety to our diets, not to mention some vitamins and minerals, and all of our fiber. Say you can eat 40 grams a day of carbohydrate and still lose weight, that's another 160 calories (again omitting any fat that comes along with those grams of carbohydrate.) So we're up to 460 calories.

All of the rest of the calories in this hypothetical diet, whether you eat another 1000 or another 5000 calories per day - will come from fat. That's what I mean by fat being the expandable-and-contractable fraction of the diet - it's the part of the diet you can eat more or less of, at your discretion, depending on how many calories you want.

Using our example of 460 calories from protein and carbs combined, and a hypothetical limit of 1800 calories per day, that leaves 1340 calories that you'll need to get from fat. 74 percent of your calories would be coming from fat, hardly a low fat diet. Yet with fat being very calorically dense, and many of our favorite and most nutritious low carb foods being very high in healthy fats, and therefore calories, it's not difficult to overshoot the mark.

So here's what I think I'll do: I think that, over the next few months, I'll do some re-examination of reduced fat products, to see which ones - like most of the fat free dressings - are "filled" with extra carbs, and which reduce calories without adding a bunch of sugar to our daily carb count.

I will report back with data as I have it. I'll also let you know if it makes a difference in my own weight!

Posted by HoldTheToast at October 22, 2003 08:36 PM