Trying to accurately measure the effect of eating any particular food with
color changes on keto strips is akin to throwing cold water out the back
door and trying to measure the effect by reading an outdoor thermometer.

Different times of the day, different amounts of liquid intake, and various
other factors are going to bring on major swings in the color reading.  You
can be losing weight very well on low-carb and get nothing indicated on the
strips.  Conversely, you can be on no low-carb diet at all, go on a long
hike or some other type of lengthy physical activity, and pee a purple.

Mark.

If you eat enough carb to take you out of ketosis, you might not get a
negative reading until the next day.  When you go out of ketosis and
refill glycogen, your body dumps all ketones to urine, so you can get
a positive reading even though you went out of ketosis.

Keto strips are unreliable and my personal opinion are that Atkins
shouldn't have suggested using them. The darkness of the strips in
inconsequential. Most people(NOT DIETING) enter some ketosis at night,
so their morning test will show the most ketosis--EVEN IF NOT DIETING.
You can darken the strips just by drinking less water and dehydrating.
It won't me you are lossing weight better-more like that you are
making yourself sick. It is meant as a simple confirmation that some
ketosis is going on. I think a heavy fat diet can also affect the
ketone count in your body.

I think you are putting too much effort in making the sticks turn
colors. A relatively steady state of ketosis is incurred when you
short your body of carbs. How few carbs it takes to do that varies
significantly. 20 carbs was chosen as a STARTING point to induce
ketosis in 95+% of people. However you may still be in ketosis when
you eat 30,40,50,60 carbs a day. Unless your cheat exceed that magic
number(CCLL) you won't fall "out of" ketosis. The purpose of Phase 2
is to find that number so you can optimally maintain continued weight
loss. Starving yourself of carbs does not make you lose faster.
Ketosis-is-ketosis. Whether at 10 or 60 if it is under your CCLL you
will be in ketosis. Starving yourself of carbs may actually promote
stalls. Several people here stalled at 20g only to resume weight loss
when they increased carbs. Throughout all of this you are trying to
fine tune your diet for your body. One number will NEVER work for
everyone.

While some people here have said they don't digest them, and others
say they do, I've never found a medical or nutritional page that says
they are undigestible. This isn't like fiber. You will digest them,
you will break them down into glucose. Know that you should count
those 22 grams of maltitol as 22 carbs. If you want to play a numbers
game to squeeze them in, maltitol is 3 cals/gram, so they are 75% of
what sugar is, or 16.5 carbs.

The rate, timing, and interaction with the body varies on *ALL* foods.
Cocoa has less glucose per carb gram than most of the sugar alcohols
(1.33 cals per gram) but I don't see anyone saying it isn't digested
and is "free". Calories per carb gram is about 4, but they actually
vary between 3-5 and some rare ones vary even more. SA's are no
different then other carbs--except too many of them have laxative
effects.

Whether or not it affects you depends upon what your CCLL is. If it is
fifty and the maltitol brings you to 40, you won't be "affected" but
your body will have processed all of the glucose in maltitol and it
AVBSOLUTELY entered your bloodstream. It will simply be hidden by the
fact that you haven't reached your CCLL. Until you know your CCLL you
will not be able to reliably(within reason) judge how much these
questionable products are processed by your body.

I seem to recall something like, alcohol is a preferred fuel and
induces a delay in processing the other sugar/ketones. Basically while
the alcohol is in your system it gets used as a fuel. Once it is
exhausted then the body goes back to using up glucose and ketones.

DiGiTAL_ViNYL (no email)
350/316/Mar-315/200
Atkins since Jan 12, 2004

Thanks for all the insight!