Sugar on the Label: How I Think About Carbs, Keto and Breakfast
Sugar in an ingredient list doesn’t tell you how many carbs are in your portion. Here’s how I think about it, along with two easy breakfast sausage recipes.
A customer asked me a good question this week: Why is there sugar in some of our ham, bacon and sausage?
If you’ve followed my own changes in how I eat, you might have wondered the same thing. I’ve cut way back on carbohydrates, and I check my ketones pretty much every morning. So where do those products fit?
For me, it comes down to portions and how a food fits into the rest of my day. My goal isn’t necessarily to eliminate every trace of sugar. It’s to keep my carbohydrate intake low enough to stay in ketosis while eating food I enjoy.
That starts with understanding what the label actually tells us.
Ingredients and amounts answer different questions
An ingredient list tells you what went into a food. It doesn’t tell you how many grams of carbohydrate are in your portion. Seeing sugar, maple syrup or dextrose gives you a reason to look more closely, but it doesn’t give you the amount.
On a nutrition label, total carbohydrate includes sugars, starch and fiber. Added sugars are already included in that total. You don’t add the sugar number to the carbohydrate number again.
Serving size matters just as much. If a label lists 1 gram of carbohydrate per serving and you eat three servings, that’s about 3 grams. Two slices of bacon can also mean very different amounts depending on how thick they’re cut.
Here’s an example from other brands’ labels, not nutrition figures for our products. Applegate’s Natural Black Forest Ham lists 1 gram of carbohydrate per 55 grams of ham. Scaled to a 3-ounce portion, that works out to roughly 1½ grams. Two bacon labels I looked at list 0 and 1 gram for their respective two-slice servings, even though both contain added sugar. A printed zero can also reflect rounding, rather than absolutely none.
That doesn’t establish a carb count for our ham or bacon. A different recipe, a sweet glaze or a bigger portion changes the picture. I’d rather be honest about what we know than give you an exact-looking number we haven’t verified.
Why put sugar in a cure?
Sugar is commonly used in ham and bacon cures to add flavor and balance the harshness of salt. It isn’t essential to every cure, and it would be wrong to say you can’t make ham or bacon without it.
It would also be wrong to assume that seeing sugar in the ingredients means a serving is loaded with carbohydrates. The amount matters. And a low carb count doesn’t, by itself, tell you everything about a food’s quality or nutrition.
How I make this practical
My morning ketone checks help me follow patterns in how my body responds to what I’m eating. One reading doesn’t prove that one particular food caused a change, but tracking over time helps me make decisions for myself.
For sausage, another option I enjoy is making it myself with our ground chuck or ground pork. No casings or special equipment. Just meat, seasonings and a skillet.
My favorite is chorizo-style breakfast sausage made with ground chuck. I also like to pressure-can mine in single-serving jelly jars so it’s ready to go into my scrambled eggs. That’s my little breakfast stash in the photo :-)
The recipes below are for cooking fresh or freezing, not pressure-canning instructions. Canning calls for a separately tested process appropriate to the food and jar size.
Two easy breakfast sausages
Neither recipe calls for added sugar or dextrose. That doesn’t make them carbohydrate-free, since spices contain some carbs.
Ground Chuck Chorizo Breakfast Sausage
- 1 lb ground chuck
- 1 tablespoon pure ground ancho chile
- 2 teaspoons smoked paprika
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- ½ teaspoon garlic powder
- ¾ teaspoon fine salt
- ½ teaspoon black pepper
- ¼ teaspoon cayenne, optional
- 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
- 1 tablespoon cold water
Mix everything gently into the ground chuck. Brown it in a skillet, breaking it into crumbles, and cook through. It’s great with scrambled eggs. This is fresh chorizo-style sausage, not dried or cured chorizo.
Pork Sage Breakfast Sausage
- 1 lb ground pork
- 1 teaspoon rubbed sage, or ½ teaspoon ground sage
- ¾ teaspoon fine salt
- ½ teaspoon black pepper
- ¼ teaspoon dried thyme
- ¼ teaspoon garlic powder
- ⅛ teaspoon crushed red pepper, optional
- 1 tablespoon cold water
Mix everything gently into the pork. Form small patties or cook it loose in the skillet. Brown and cook through.
With either recipe, cook a small piece first and adjust the seasonings to your taste. For a bigger batch, portion and freeze promptly, then thaw in the refrigerator when you’re ready to use it.
That’s how I approach it: understand the ingredients, pay attention to the amount, and keep the everyday meals simple. A pound of good ground meat gives you a lot of room to do that.
Chris
