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Carbs in augergine parmigiana recipe on Diabetes UK website

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Fiona#42

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This may seem a stupid question. According to the recipe, this has 19g carbs per portion. However I can't work out where they're coming from - aubergines seem to be low carb, and the only thing that seems carby is almond flour - there's 25g of that in the whole thing. I don't eat red meat, and I love aubergines, so it would be a good evening meal. I have been trying to work out the carbs in the recipes I cook regularly, but other half is getting fed up of me telling him how many carbs there are in what we are eating (he can eat anything, and the lucky so and so doesn't seem to put weight on). I don't want to ave to start cooking separatelyfor me, I used todo that when I was trying to stick to 1000 caories a day (pre diabetes) and it was miserable.
 
Some will be from the tinned tomatoes @Fiona#42 They often have 10g carbs per can. Then there’s probably some in the tomato purée. I wouldn’t bolus for 19g carbs if I ate that as I’d ignore the aubergine carbs and the green salad carbs as neither of those are ‘countable for bolus purposes’. If you’re not on any meds like insulin, etc, I wouldn’t worry. If you’re are on fast-acting insulin, then I’d only bolus a small amount if any for that meal. If you’re on fixed doses of insulin, you might need extra carbs with it.
 
Not a stupid question at all@Fiona#42. Back in the early days (for me) with a high Hba1c I found this site and found out about carbs and the idea that lowering carb intake was very likely to be beneficial. Doing my normal thing, I tried to find out how many carbs were in things and tried to work out how good the numbers are. I fairly rapidly rapidly came to the conclusion that carb values are very much for guidance only - they are mostly guesswork with the guesses made by people who ought to be good at making the guesses. The reason is that you cannot measure the carb content of anything with any precision.

Take your aubergine recipe.... I very much doubt if whoever came up with 19g/per portion got 10 people to make the dish using ingredients from different sources and then sent samples off to a laboratory to measure carb levels (not an easy thing to do) and has presented an average of those measurements as carbs/per portion.

Much more likely is that the carb content is a guess and whoever guessed at 19g/per portion will have looked up the carb contents of the ingredients (all guesses), guessed how much of each ingredient finished up in the dish, might have guessed the effect of cooking and from all that came up with the number 19. It is a good a guess as any but it is a guess.

So I would read 19g carb per portion as a lowish carb dish and would treat it as OK for a low carb diet regime and if a T1 like @Inka would not bolus for it, then I would expect my system to cope with it easily and for it not to produce an unacceptable BG rise.
 
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@Fiona#42, Getting comfortable with estimates and recognising that all the numbers we see used are estimates is a good start to getting a proper perspective on things and then being able to use the numbers to improve things without a lot of heartache and fuss.

Simply knowing that your aubergine dish is somewhere around 20g carbs per portion and not somewhere around 50g per portion is enough to say it will not make a big dent in a diet aiming for 120-150 g/day, so give it a go.
 
This is a dish that I make a lot for my Market and agree with all of the above. I use courgette / aubergine as I'm not too fond of the latter and need to be able to eat what I don't sell. I like to use fried breadcrumbs sprinkled on top but it is a guess as to the carb. COOK make a frozen one and the carb content will be on their packet. I reckon a smallish portion plus side salad would be a very reasonable evening meal..........but don't do the garlic. Bread!
 
@Fiona#42 I had to work backwards when I started out until I realised that I can get more carbs from peas and beans than the listed values, so I tested my blood glucose after eating meals which should have been OK, but turned out a bit iffy.
The difference was usually around 180% of the listed carb amount, so all was well once I went with halving the amount of peas or beans unless they were in pods.
If you eat what seems like a safe amount of a dish and then test at the two hour mark and the level is what you would expect, give the recipe a tick - otherwise adjust to compensate.
 
Out of interest, I ran this recipe through a new feature I am adding to my diabetes web application (one that tries to calculate nutritional information for recipes I find online). The results are shown in the attached screen capture.

At a quick glance, it appears that the greatest contributors to carbs are tomatoes, onions and aubergine. Further, much depends on the size of the aubergine ('medium' is quite vague really).

Anyway, I thought this information might be of interest.

aubergine parmigiana.png
 
littlevoice359 said:
Out of interest, I ran this recipe through a new feature I am adding to my diabetes web application (one that tries to calculate nutritional information for recipes I find online). The results are shown in the attached screen capture.

At a quick glance, it appears that the greatest contributors to carbs are tomatoes, onions and aubergine. Further, much depends on the size of the aubergine ('medium' is quite vague really).

Anyway, I thought this information might be of interest.

View attachment 36479
Click to expand...
Seems a bit of an over estimate on the aubergine for carbs if you look at the per 100g and the weight that is used in the recipe
 
Leadinglights said:
Seems a bit of an over estimate on the aubergine for carbs if you look at the per 100g and the weight that is used in the recipe
Click to expand...
That’s what I thought also. I am using an API I have not worked with previously and it looks like it may have some quirks.
 
@littlevoice359. I do not know where you are getting your carb values from but you cannot measure carb values, particularly with vegetables, to the precision implied in your table. Any results you get will be peculiar to the source you are using.

The idea that two medium aubergines contain 98.82 g of carbohydrate is a bit far fetched. What variety of aubergine, how ripe, how long have they been in storage apart from just how big is medium, are variables not taken into account. Have you thought about building these variables as an error into your app?
 
It looks like that 98.82 g carbs probably includes fiber/fibre perhaps sourced from a US site? It definitely looks wrong as that would make aubergines more carb rich than spuds!
 
rebrascora said:
It looks like that 98.82 g carbs probably includes fiber/fibre perhaps sourced from a US site? It definitely looks wrong as that would make aubergines more carb rich than spuds!
Click to expand...
It could be but in the table it is spelt fibre not fiber, in US they tend to call aubergines egg plants. But if you deduct the fibre numbers from all the ingredient it would look a more sensible amount of carbs.
 
Just checked the Carbs and Cals book. 90 gms aubergine fried in olive is 3 gms carb, so 98 gms for so two seems a huge number , and that's before you add anything into a recipe. Not my favourite veg, don't care for the texture, but ok in moussaka and parmigiana......... tonights tea I'm afraid. Small portion of aubergine and courgette pasta bake, not sold at market and must be used.
 
I eat a similar aubergine dish and I don’t need to bolus for it (I use fresh tomatoes not tinned) so I know those carbs are too high @littlevoice359
 
Leadinglights said:
It could be but in the table it is spelt fibre not fiber, in US they tend to call aubergines egg plants. But if you deduct the fibre numbers from all the ingredient it would look a more sensible amount of carbs.
Click to expand...
The table is @littlevoice359 's own, hence the U.K. spelling and name, but he may have sourced his figures from a US site including fibre/fiber.
 
Carbs listed for aubergine are totally and ridiculously wrong - they are maybe 5% carb
 
I’m pretty sure the API I am using is US-based and I have a plan to deal with that. Using this recipe as a test has been particularly useful because it highlights the error in the aubergine carbs (and weight) estimations. Absent of such a glaring error I might not have seen the magnitude of the problem.

As it happens, I was actually more interested in the natural language processing aspects of the API and, for that reason I see some definite positives from this exercise. Enough that I am going to move forward. With luck I will have something useful in a few days.
 
littlevoice359 said:
I’m pretty sure the API I am using is US-based and I have a plan to deal with that. Using this recipe as a test has been particularly useful because it highlights the error in the aubergine carbs (and weight) estimations.

I was actually more interested in the natural language processing aspects of the API and, for that reason I see some positives from this exercise. With luck I will have something useful in a few days.
Click to expand...
I hope you don't think we were being too critical but it is worth having a reality check if something doesn't seem sensible.
 
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