
June 29, 2002
Meal Planning, Food and Diet
Question from Conover, North Carolina, USA:
Is the sugar gram count included in the carb count in foods? If yogurt has 17 grams of carbs and 16 grams of sugar, is this a total of 17 or a total of 33 grams?
Answer:
This is one of the questions that seems to be troublesome to a lot of people when they begin to start reading and interpreting nutrition labels. The total grams of carbohydrate includes the grams of sugar and the dietary fiber. So in this case, the yogurt contains a total of 17 grams of carbohydrate, 16 of which are sugar. Nowadays, we teach people with diabetes to focus on the total grams of carbohydrate rather than grams of sugar or comparing sugars with total carbohydrate.
JMS