As I contemplate how to lower the carbs in favorite dishes by using substitutions like spiralized vegetables for noodles or chopped up cauliflower for rice or potatoes, I find it useful to look up precisely how many carbs are in these vegetables. Sometimes I’ve been quite surprised! My preconception of how carb-tastic (or not) a particular vegetable may be sometimes takes me by surprise.

It started when I picked up a small sack of sweet potatoes, intending to spiralize them into lower-carb noodles for serving with a favorite cheese sauce. I was right at the start of my new low-carb diet, and I was excited and proud of myself for finding a great compromise: a vegetable I really liked to substitute for the pasta I was craving. Just out of curiosity, though, I looked up sweet potato nutritional facts… as it turned out they are LOWER-carb, but actually not that far away from pasta itself.

As I continue to look up various vegetables and other foods, I find myself back-tracking a lot (“… wait, what was the carb count on that again?”), so I’ve decided to make a compendium. I make no claims to super accuracy here; this compendium is just the result of my casual research on Google, and when necessary, other nutritional info and calories counting sites. If anyone begs to differ on any of these items, by all means, let me know and send me some more reliable research.

In this compendium, I use as my baseline 100g of each food item. I have found it very enlightening to equalize the amounts of each item, since the serving sizes many nutritional charts use vary widely from food to food. I want to know how the EXACT SAME amount compares. I also like to use 100g, because the carb counts are also listed in grams, so mathematically it boils down to a percentage. It helps me to consider what percentage of any food is carbs for purposes of comparison/contrast.

Finally, I’ve also included the calorie count for the same amount of each item (yes, calories, I unfortunately haven’t forgotten about you completely… sigh…). Some foods, it turns out, may not be so far away in carb content, but have a bigger deficit in calories. Butternut squash vs. white potatoes, for instance. They aren’t miles away in carb count, but the calorie difference is quite a gulf! I’m going to start this compendium as a scaling list from low to high, but I hope eventually to duplicate it in alphabetical order, as well.

SARAH’S CARB AND CALORIE COMPENDIUM

Am I missing something? I wracked my brain for as many vegetables as I could think of, plus a few other things for comparison, but if there’s anything I forgot, I’m happy to add it. Let me know in the comments section and I’ll add in a detail line.