Carbs Count, But How? Understanding Net Carbs vs. Total Carbs

04/16/25 • 12 min

You may be confused regarding net carbs versus total carbs. So let’s demystify it. Shall we. Keep listening.

I see it online all the time. Total carbs or net carbs. I also see are you strict keto, lazy keto, dirty keto? What’s your daily carb limit? What are your macros? But particularly Total carbs or net carbs.

I am all for anything that works for the individual, but I fear that this kind of focus on micromanagement may scare some people off.

Total Carbs or Net Carbs

The first commercially successful low-carb diet book was Banting’s Letter on Corpulence first published in 1863 at William Banting’s own expense. It was such a success that Banting became a synonym for dieting and Professor Tim Noakes has revived the term in South Africa.

Banting stated, “My kind and valued medical advisor is not a doctor for obesity, but stands on the pinnacle of fame in the treatment of another malady, which as he well knows is frequently induced by Corpulence.”

Banting’s diet was four meals per day consisting of meat, greens, fruits and dry wine. The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, starch, beer, milk, butter, and saccharin matter. Here, saccharin matter refers to anything that turns to sugar in the bloodstream. The artificial sweetener we call saccharin had yet to be invented.

Notice something, no mention of counting carbs, much less total versus net carbs. Just eat meat, green vegetables, fruits and dry wine. The diet worked for Banting and for many others.

I have on my shelf a book I found when I was cleaning out my late great-Aunt Betty’s house called Eat and Grow Thin; the Mahdah Menus published in 1914. It too outlined a low carbohydrate diet. It too calls for no counting. When I was growing up, everyone knew that if you wanted to lose weight, you gave up potatoes, spaghetti, bread, and sweets, and focused on animal protein and green vegetables. Every diner and coffee shop offered a diet plate consisting of a bunless hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese and either sliced tomatoes or a half a canned peach.

Enter the Stillman Diet

In 1967, Dr. Irwin Stillman’s diet was both very low carb and low fat calling for almost nothing but very lean meat, plus at least eight glasses of water per day. Having tried it as a kid, I can attest to it being effective, but too limited for continued use.

Enter Dr. Atkins and Counting Carbs

I trust we can take it as read that the Atkins diet works by liberalizing fat and including some vegetables and those in increasing quantities. As the diet progressed, the Atkins diet was and remains far more livable than Stillman’s.

Links and Show Notes

https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-28-understanding-net-carbs-vs-total-carbs.html

Website CarbSmart.com

https://CarbSmart.com

Episode 28 Featured Recipe

https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast28recipe

Find Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

https://www.carbsmart.com/author/dana

Show Notes

https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-28-understanding-net-carbs-vs-total-carbs.html

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You may be confused regarding net carbs versus total carbs. So let’s demystify it. Shall we. Keep listening.

I am all for anything that works for the individual, but I fear that this kind of focus on micromanagement may scare some people off.

Total Carbs or Net Carbs

Notice something, no mention of counting carbs, much less total versus net carbs. Just eat meat, green vegetables, fruits and dry wine. The diet worked for Banting and for many others.

Enter the Stillman Diet

Enter Dr. Atkins and Counting Carbs

Links and Show Notes

https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-28-understanding-net-carbs-vs-total-carbs.html

Website CarbSmart.com

https://CarbSmart.com

Episode 28 Featured Recipe

https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast28recipe

Find Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

https://www.carbsmart.com/author/dana

Show Notes

https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-28-understanding-net-carbs-vs-total-carbs.html

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

27. Eat It Again! How Repetition Rewires Your Taste

Eat It Again! How Repetition Rewires Your Taste

If you’ve just recently gone low-carb, say as a New Year’s resolution, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer difference from your old diet.

Faux-tatoes instead of mashed potatoes. Lunches that don’t include sandwiches, heavy cream and flavored stevia in your coffee instead of creamer. I am here to cheer you on and give you good reason to stick it out. A reason that doesn’t have to do with the scale or your health.

Many years ago, when my sister was a private school teacher, her pay was painfully low. She had to scramble each spring to find a summer job. For a few years, she worked for a company that brought over French foreign exchange students. She had to find them host families, and then during the week, she drove them around the San Diego area in a van, showing them the sites and giving them a taste of American culture.

Speaking of taste, every single French teenager she worked with simply adored liver pate, but found peanut butter revolting. From this, it becomes clear every taste is an acquired taste. If you’re just starting your low-carb journey, you may find that some things taste...funny. Not bad, just different from what you’re used to, different from what you grew up on. Please remember that all tastes are acquired tastes.

Do you know how old I am?

“How old are you?” I hear you cry. I’m so old. I walked home for lunch every day. Through elementary school, mom largely relied on simple stuff for our lunches, canned soup, frozen pot pies, or macaroni and cheese, or frozen pizza and wagon wheel shaped noodles with jarred spaghetti sauce and Parmesan.

The jarred sauce she used back in the 1960s was Ragu Old World Style. I don’t know if the recipe has changed over the past 50 odd years, but it currently contains tomato puree, which is water and tomato paste, salt, olive oil, sugar, dehydrated onions, dehydrated garlic spices, garlic powder, onion powder.

That was the jarred spaghetti sauce of my childhood, and I often had it at lunch. My mother did make awesome homemade spaghetti sauce for family dinners. I wish I had that recipe.

Then at 19, I quit sugar and white flour. I started eating whole wheat noodles and I switched over to a jarred sauce that had no sugar.

It tasted... funny. Not bad, mind you, I was willing to eat it. It just tasted different. It wasn’t what I’d grown up on, but I wasn’t going back to eating sauce with sugar and it, so I stuck with it. Pretty soon, that sauce was what my taste buds expected, and it tasted great.