? Confused about carbs

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Squalliesmom

Squalliesmom

Member Since 2015
Well, I thought I had a handle on good carbs/% calories/bad carbs, etc, etc, but now I am confused about wet matter versus dry matter carbs. Which one are we supposed to keep under 10%? Lots of foods that have wet matter carbs that are low have dry matter values that make me groan! Which one do I use as my guideline? :confused:
 
It's % of calories from carbs that matter for a diabetic - that's what you need to keep under 10%. Dry matter values are used for some other things - the one that springs to mind is phosphorus for CKD cats.
 
So it's the wet matter carbs I need to worry about? That's what I've gone by thus far, but now I keep seeing dry matter references and calculators and was afraid maybe I was concerned about the wrong thing!
 
It's not quite the wet matter carbs either. We do generally need to use a calculator to figure out the % of calories from carbs because how that relates to either the wet matter % or the dry matter % depends on the exact food and its calorie count. I use the calculator here http://scheyderweb.com/cats/catfood.html which calculates the number of calories in 100 g of food for you. It also shows you how many calories come from carbs - you can then work out whether that's over or under 10% of the total calorie value easily.
 
Squalliesmom said:
So it's the wet matter carbs I need to worry about?
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Not really. As already said by manxcat419, you what to look at the % of calories from carbs. Wet or dry really does not make a difference since water does not have any calories. The only food constituents that have calories are fat, protein and carbs.
 
manxcat419 said:
I use the calculator here http://scheyderweb.com/cats/catfood.html which calculates the number of calories in 100 g of food for you. It also shows you how many calories come from carbs - you can then work out whether that's over or under 10% of the total calorie value easily.
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I use this one, too, but I wasn't aware that I needed to make another calculation to determine the % of total calorie value. What am I missing?
 
You're probably not really missing anything except that last step. Say the food has 100 calories per 100 g and 5 of those calories (or 5%) coming from carbs, then it's good. But if it has 100 calories per 100 g and 20 of those calories come from carbs, no matter how good either the wet or dry percentages look, too many of the calories are still coming from those carbs.
 
manxcat419 said:
You're probably not really missing anything except that last step. Say the food has 100 calories per 100 g and 5 of those calories (or 5%) coming from carbs, then it's good. But if it has 100 calories per 100 g and 20 of those calories come from carbs, no matter how good either the wet or dry percentages look, too many of the calories are still coming from those carbs.
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Oh, okay, I think I get it. Thank you!
 
manxcat419 said:
You're probably not really missing anything except that last step. Say the food has 100 calories per 100 g and 5 of those calories (or 5%) coming from carbs, then it's good. But if it has 100 calories per 100 g and 20 of those calories come from carbs, no matter how good either the wet or dry percentages look, too many of the calories are still coming from those carbs.
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Nope, not getting it at all. I thought I had it but apparently I don't. Using http://scheyderweb.com/cats/catfood.html I entered the values for a food that comes out to 55 calories per 100g of food. It says the wet matter carbs are 2.099%, and the dry matter carbs are 13%. How do I determine if this food is acceptable or not? I'm sorry to be so stupid, but I am really math- and numbers-challenged!
 
This is what I get:
carb sample.png
 
OK, so 7 of the calories are from carbs, but it only has 55 calories in total. Which makes the calories from carbs 12.73%. The calculation is (100/55) *7
 
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