How is low carb a different story? Last time I checked, you can have pretty much any protein you want as long as it's not breaded or has sugar added to it (let's see that leaves eggs, pork, beef, chicken, finfish and shellfish), there are at least a couple dozen vegetables and some non-sweet fruits (cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados, olives) allowed even during induction as well as any type of fat that is not a transfat. You can use heavy cream, a moderate amount of artificial sweetener, lemon juice and cheese to create sauces as well as herbs and spices in moderation. Frankenfoods, boxed foods and pre-made meals are a convenience, not a necessity.
No, you can't eat anything you want and as much of it as you can stuff in, but find me any weight loss program out there that says you can and still lose weight.

What's more disturbing to me is people who ovvereact to non-events and make up alarmist conclusions based on some subjective perception of what's going on, rather than bother to comprehend and understand reality.

Are you alarmed by carbonation, too? "Gee, this glass of sparkling water sizzles. It must be poison."

Less then 10% of low carbers do this "all" natural mumbojumbo.

No diet soda.
No protein bars
No protein shakes.
No sweetener in anything
nothing packaged , like LC wraps or pita bread
No packaged salad dressings
etc etc etc.

People who say ohhh im all natural are just trying to project and image of them selves. Its BS you don't need to be "All" natural to benefit from a low carb diet. It would be alot harder to try and stay all natural. Unless you really really like to drink just water and unsweetened tea.

Why yes. Yes, I am. Carbonation and bright colors terrify me, along with shiny metal objects, lava lamps and popcorn. I'd expound, but doing so might cause me to overreact to conclusions of non-events which I neither comprehend nor understand due to my alarmingly subjective perceptions of reality. Must be the side-effects of all that Splenda I'm eating.

Less than 10% of the population follows a low carb plan. Your point would be?



*sigh* why does it always have to be one extreme or the other? Can you eat processed foods and still benefit from a low carb plan? That depends largely on the processed foods you choose. If you're eating highly processed products with high fructose corn syrup and transfats in them and lots of them, then I'd say that you're probably shortchanging yourself quite a bit. Many of the low carb products targeted specifically to low carbers contain ingredients that most (if not all) low carb authors encourage those who follow their plans to avoid.
OTOH, if you choose wisely and pay attention to what's in the stuff you're eating, avoiding the things that are known to have negative health consequences, then sure. Why not?
Generally, though, you are far better off making the majority of your choices whole, unprocessed foods and using processed products (please note, I'm not including salad dressings and such in this category) only occasionally. My observation is that those who do this are generally the ones that are most successful at low carb.

I know a few lc-ers who even consider salad dressings and such taboo. It has to be oil and vinegar, lest a stray gram of ranch dressing carbs get in there somewhere.

What I didn't notice anyone mentioning so far is that there are two kinds of Splenda, and they are different. Splenda comes in packets, where one packet is one serving and is actually a fairly small amount of the powder, and it comes as a bulked-up bulk product which is made so that one teaspoon is intended to be equivalent in sweetness to one teaspoon of sugar. (This Splenda is specially designed for use in cooking so that you can use sugar measures.)

Obviously, there is something else or something different about the bulk product. What I've noticed is that the packets don't sizzle, or if they do, not so much. The bulked product sizzles not at all or not very much if put into cold water, but if put into hot water, it definitely sizzles.

I think that the bulk product incorporates a lot of trapped air. When it is added to hot water, the air expands rapidly and pops the "bubbles", so to speak. In cold water, the effect is not as strong.

None of the ingredients in either kind of Splenda would cause a chemical reaction with water. Splenda itself is not going to change so radically in water, if at all, to release a gas.

It's air, folks. It's not even carbonation.

I googled Splenda Fizzes and found a fair amount of confirmation; at least there are others who have reported that the bulk Splenda fizzes and not the packets. There was also a theory that the dissolving material changes the boiling point of the water, so that a tiny amount of water boils. From my educated but amateur knowledge of physics, I find this unlikely. Dissolving stuff in water raises the boiling point, in general. But if water is already at boiling temperature, crystals and the like can catalyze the formation of bubbles.... the water in question is not that hot.

Most food is processed. I processed some cabbage this morning by cutting it into shreds. I process my eggs by cracking them and cooking them. Who knows what goes into making powdered stevia and other "natural" substances.

If you want truly unprocessed food, you'd better go chew a chicken right out of the hen house, none of this butchering nonsense, sorry, plucking the feathers off is cheating. Chase it down with lettuce salad chewed off the stem from the garden.

It'd be a great diet! Weight loss guaranteed! I think the paleo's come closest to truly eating unprocessed food... but even they're cheating!

*just being silly*

In the food industry it is very difficult to determine what is natural and what is unnatural. It is also too easy to demonise carbohydrates as being "bad" and to claim that food processing is "bad" also.

I have accepted for a long time that restricting my carb intake is the only way that I am able to control weight gain. I have also used Splenda as substitute for sugar. (btw splenda tabs do not fizz but the granules do, it is the bulking agent and not the sucrolose itself that fizzes).

If we just take a little time out to look at "pure" sugar.

What we call sugar, the chemist knows as 'sucrose', one of the family of sugars otherwise known as saccharides in the grouping called carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, as the name implies, contain carbon and hydrogen plus oxygen in the same ratio as in water. The saccharides is a large family with the general formula CnH2nOn. The simplest of the sugars is glucose, C6H12O6, although its physical chemistry is not that simple because it occurs in two distinct forms which affect some of its properties. Sucrose, C12H22O11, is a disaccharide, a condensation molecule made up of two glucose molecules [less a water molecule to make the chemistry work].

The process whereby plants make sugars is photosynthesis. The plant takes in carbon dioxide from the air though pores in its leaves and absorbs water through its roots. These are combined to make sugar using energy from the sun and with the help of a substance called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green which allows it to absorb the sun's energy more readily and which, of course, gives the plants' leaves their green colour. The reaction of photosynthesis can be written as the following chemical equation when sucrose is being made:

12 CO2 + 11 H2 O = C12 H22 O11 + 12 O2
carbon dioxide + water = sucrose + oxygen

This shows that oxygen is given off during the process of photosynthesis.

It is already sounding a bit unnatural but that is just the beginning..... ( you may want to skip read the next bit to my last few paras but then again if you are interested read on)

The first stage of processing raw sugar is to soften and then remove the layer of mother liquor surrounding the crystals with a process called "affination". The raw sugar is mixed with a warm, concentrated syrup of slightly higher purity than the syrup layer so that it will not dissolve the crystals. The resulting magma is centrifuged to separate the crystals from the syrup thus removing the greater part of the impurities from the input sugar and leaving the crystals ready for dissolving before further treatment.

The liquor which results from dissolving the washed crystals still contains some colour, fine particles, gums and resins and other non-sugars.

The next stage of processing the liquor is aimed at removing the solids which make the liquor turbid. Coincidentally some of the colour is removed too. One of the two common processing techniques is known as carbonatation where small clumps of chalk are grown in the juice. The clumps, as they form, collect a lot of the non-sugars so that by filtering out the chalk one also takes out the non-sugars. Once this is done, the sugar liquor is now ready for decolourisation. The other technique, phosphatation, is chemically similar but uses phosphate rather than carbonate formation.

There are also two common methods of colour removal in refineries, both relying on absorption techniques with the liquor being pumped through columns of medium. One option open to the refiner is to use granular activated carbon [GAC] which removes most colour but little else. The carbon is regenerated in a hot kiln where the colour is burnt off from the carbon. The other option is to use an ion exchange resin which removes less colour than GAC but also removes some of the inorganics present. The resin is regenerated chemically which gives rise to large quantities of unpleasant liquid effluents.


The clear, lightly coloured liquor is now ready for crystallisation except that it is a little too dilute for optimum energy consumption in the refinery. It is therefore evaporated prior to going to the crystallisation pan.

In the pan even more water is boiled off until conditions are right for sugar crystals to grow. In the factory the workers throw in some sugar dust to initiate crystal formation. Once the crystals have grown the resulting mixture of crystals and mother liquor is spun in centrifuges to separate the two, rather like washing is spin dried. The crystals are then given a final dry with hot air before being packed and/or stored ready for despatch.

The liquor left over from the preparation of white sugar and the washings from the affination stage both contain sugar which it is economic to recover. They are therefore sent to the recovery house which operates rather like a raw sugar factory, aiming to make a sugar with a quality comparable to the washed raws after the affination stage. As with the other sugar processes, one cannot get all of the sugar out of the liquor and therefore there is a sweet by-product made: refiners' molasses. This is usually turned into a cattle food or is sent to a distillery where alcohol is made.

Now I am not a Science major either but sugar don't seem natural to me either:-)

Having read all this you may be even more inclined to give up sugar. But conversely you need not be put off a carb free sweetener by a description of the manufacturing process.

The most natural sugar that you can get if sugar is what you crave is.............HONEY

I think moderation is the key. Taking a lot of any artificial sweetner just keeps those tastbuds for sweets alive. You've got to get used to the way food tastes naturally. I avoid them all, except a bit in my flax cereal, which tastes like ground cardboard without it.