The hype around low carbs

Low carb has been the buzz word for quite sometime now and I know many of my non-food science friends who are such a big fan of buying low carb product. No body likes calroies any more. What r the options to avoid those heavy calories in those tasty foods (ice creams, chocolates, cheese, cakes) - 1) you stop drinking or eating that high calorie product, 2) start with the low carb variety, courtsey - saccharin, aspartame and the recent one splenda or u have another option - to be like me :) (Can't help eating those cakes ansd chocolates).

In this post, I am neither trying to show my food science expertise nor do I mean to discourage those of you who r a big fan of low carbs. But I am just going to show some light on the hype aroung this whole low carb thing. For those of you who dont have much idea about the sweetness of the artificial sweetners - Splenda is 600 times sweeter than normal table sugar, saccharin is around 300 times sweeter than normal table sugar and aspartame is 180 times sweeter than normal table sugar. Those figures look cool as u might end up thinking this is how the food companies make low card foods. so for 600 gms of table sugar they put 1 gm of splenda and thats it.....I wish thats were it thought. The sad part is the u need to compensate for that 599 gm or else ur texture will change. So they put 599 gm of fake carbs like crystalline cellulose which basically gives the texture and since human body cant digest cellulose u dont end up getting calories from that.

The catch 22 situation is that one has a tendency to have more of a low carb food as u think u r not taking carbs really. But by doing that u r taking in more of cellulose which is not digestible and that is really bad for the stomach.

So, bottom line is - "One should consume less of a low carb food than the normal food". You can also see this as there is not a better way to get rid of calories than by burning them in the gym :)