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Tortillas

Posted by Brian.

I accidently bought “carb balance” tortillas this week. Nasty. I thought (and wished and hoped) we were done with that damn carb counting craze. I was thinking “these things taste kind of like cardboard or paper” (you know, like when there’s a little cardboard stuck to the bottom of a piece of pizza or you accidently eat the paper that a taco is wrapped in). So I checked the ingredients to see if they included “wood pulp” or “recycled paper”, and guess what!? The fifth ingredient is “powdered cellulose”!! Last time I checked, cellulose was the primary component of paper. But just to make sure, I looked up cellulose in a dictionary:


cellulose: A complex carbohydrate, (C6H10O5)n, that is composed of glucose units, forms the main constituent of the cell wall in most plants, and is important in the manufacture of numerous products, such as paper, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and explosives.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

So, not only do these tortillas contain paper (or explosives?), but (humourously, in my opinion), cellulose is itself also a carbohydrate. I guess that’s why they call them “carb balance” rather than “low carb”.

  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 1:25 pm and is filed under food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Tortillas”

  1. Becky Says:
    November 22nd, 2005 at 2:40 pm Using Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows Windows XP

    I thought it didn’t really count as a carb in the food sence, since you can’t digest it.

    Mmmm tastey explosives?

  2. Tim Says:
    November 22nd, 2005 at 5:48 pm Using Safari Safari 312.3.1 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    Yeah; only the little psymbiotic protists inside the guts of termites can really process cellulose efficiently.

    Cellulose is in fact one of the big parts of the roughage that constitutes dietary fiber (particularly the insoluble portion), if I remember correctly.

    Also: mega-bonus points to Becky for the biology/nutrition trivia!

  3. Nathaniel Says:
    November 22nd, 2005 at 11:11 pm Using OmniWeb OmniWeb on Mac OS Mac OS X

    Well, I think in the atkins plan, you get to subtract the “fiber” from the real carbs to get the “net carbs”. So, by putting cellulose in there they not only got to take up space that would normally be used by flour, but they also got to subtract the mass of the cellulose from the total carbohydrates to get the (only 3g of carbs*” on the front.

    I’ve also seen products using sesame seed hulls for the same thing. (the wraps used at Subway)

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