If you’re trying to lose weight or to control your blood sugar levels by eating low carb foods you need to watch out for hidden carbs. What do I mean by this? You need to be sure that the way the food is prepared doesn’t add hidden carbohydrates that can come back to haunt you. Whether you know the carbs or present or not, they can still affect your body and your health plan. Here’s a good example of how I got caught up in this problem.
Meats and poultry have no carbs in general. That means, if you are on a low carb food diet then you can eat as much as you want with out worrying about the amount of carbs you are getting. Because you are eating proteins and fats when you eat these foods.
Where I got into trouble was with chicken. This is poultry and so I told myself that if I ate chicken I wouldn’t have to count any carbs. It sounded good to be. But I was eating chicken strips instead of uncoated chicken. This seemed like a good idea because these strips are easy to get when you are on the run, they taste great, and they are chicken so there is no carbs. Right? Wrong!
The breading the strips were dipped in added quite a bit of flour and sugar which both need to be limited when you are trying to control carb intake. I told myself these were good for me because it was chicken, but in reality I was adding several grams of carbohydrates at every meal.

How Many Carbs In Chicken

Let’s take a look at what I mean. These two tables shows the effects of different way you can prepare chicken and the resulting net carbs the food will have.

As you can see chicken is a very good food to eat when you are limiting the amount of carbs you are consuming each day. In fact, all of these ways of preparing it will give you basically no net carbs.
But what happens when your healthy chicken piece is coated with some type of batter such as with fried chicken, chicken strips, or chicken nuggets.

This second table shows how just adding a little coating to a great low carb food, namely chicken, can suddenly tip the scales ( both the cab scales and you weight scales). When you are choosing what you want to eat you really need to pay attention to how the food is prepared and what may have been added such as flour and even sugar.
Some other meat based foods that can get you in trouble are hot dogs, sausage, and meatloaf. On the face of it you think there is no problem, but prepared meats and meat dishes often time have added ingredients that change the resulting net carbs.
Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking you are eating no carb foods when actually you are consuming net carbs with each bit.
If you have an example of when you got caught with hidden carbs please leave a comment so others can learn from your experiences. If we all work together we can have great health.