Powdered Fats with Keto Chow and rounding on nutrition labels

This is a topic I’ve looked at twice before, once with powdered cream from Hooser Hill Farms and once with powdered cream from Anthony’s. I actually was working on a completely different project yesterday and happened upon the product specifications for the specific ingredient that (I believe) is used for Anthony’s Powdered Cream. This represents FAR more accurate information than what I previously had available so I’m going to revisit my earlier post.

This is something that has been asked a lot and will continue to be asked: is there a powdered cream that can be used with Keto Chow? People would like it for the convenience factor of being able to just add water – perfect for hiking or other uses where transporting liquid isn’t an option and you don’t want to have to melt butter for your fat. The issue becomes: whenever you take a liquid and make it into a powder you’re going to be doing 3 things and typically doing a 4th thing:

1. The volume will be larger for the same number of calories
2. The mass or weight will be higher for the same number of calories
3. The cost will be higher for the same number of calories
4. The number of carbohydrates will be higher for the same number of calories

Now, if the convenience of having a “just add water” mix outweighs those factors, you have a winner. Otherwise, there is some analysis to be done. Let’s do some comparisons! When doing these comparisons I’m going to make use of the nutrition specifications I found that are FAR more accurate than what is shown on a nutrition facts panel. The panels will tell you the ROUNDED number per serving which is something like a tablespoon or an ounce – the specifications will tell you the typical values per 100g or what percent they are. The USDA common foods database also has these 100g values and are accurate to 1 decimal or better.

product	cost	grams	calories/100g	carbs/100g	carbs per calorie	carbs 1500 Cal	$ per 1500 Cal	nutrition specs
Sweet Cream Powder	14.99	454	744.3	12.8	0.017	25.796	6.65	specs
Butter Powder	12.99	454	698.7	7.7	0.011	16.53	6.14	specs
Liquid Heavy Cream	3.98	952	340	2.84	0.0084	12.529	1.84	specs
Regular Butter	9.46	1816	717	0.06	0.000084	0.126	1.09	specs

The nutrition label for all 4 of these products show 0g of carbs per serving because anything under 0.5 gets rounded down to 0 or “less than 1g” The problem with that rounding is that we’re not talking about using a 1 tablespoon (6g) serving of the powdered cream, we’re talking about potentially using 200g over a day to reach 1800 calories (300 from keto chow, 1500 from the fat) for 3 meals. “Where’s the powdered OIL?” you say. That’s another issue entirely: it’s relatively easy to find powdered MCT oil, but few other oils are powdered on anything suitable for a keto diet. Most oils are combined with maltodextrin (starch) to make them a powder, which is not suitable at ALL for a keto diet. MCT might be on maltodextrin, or they could use one of the suitable media: acacia gum, soluble corn fiber, or casein protein; the first two add total carbs as fiber. The REAL problem for MCT oil is: using powdered MCT oil for a significant percentage of your daily calories is not something I would recommend trying (it’ll jack up your HDL and triglycerides and will not be nice to your bowels).

Now: few people are using Keto Chow 3 meals a day for all their meals, and your specific calories might be higher or lower (I figured 1500 made the math easy). 1/3 of the 25.8 carbs you’d get from the powdered cream, plus the carbs from Keto Chow (depending on flavor) would have you around 9.3g of non-fiber (net) carbs in each meal. Does 9.3g for a meal fit into YOUR carb budget for the day? If you’re backpacking and otherwise exercising it might be perfect! If not… maybe not. The powdered versions are FAR more expensive, that is for sure (3.6x for the cream, 5.6x for the butter)!

So again: does the convenience of having a powdered fat outweigh the costs? That’s for YOU to decide =)