In this LAB note
Question · Hypothesis · Method · Results · What Failed · What We Learned · What Changed at MOMS
Question
If 153 MOMS shakes add a sweetener and 48 add none, why do the 48 unsweetened shakes carry 5.8 more grams of carbohydrate?
Hypothesis
We expected the opposite. The Flavor slot holds agave, maple syrup, honey, monk fruit, lemon or cinnamon, in doses from about 1 gram to 20 grams, and several of those are close to pure carbohydrate. Leaving the slot empty should therefore remove carbohydrate, not add it. If the unsweetened shakes came out higher, the likeliest explanation was that something else in the recipe was carrying the sweetness. The first place to look was the Fruit & Vegetable slot, which is the only other slot that moves carbohydrate by tens of grams.
Method
We split our 201 recipes by one rule: does the Flavor slot hold an ingredient or is it empty? That gave 153 flavored shakes and 48 with no flavor entry. For each group we averaged the listed carbohydrate, calories, protein and fat, and summed the grams in the Fruit & Vegetable slot. We then repeated the carbohydrate comparison inside each of the eight body-type codes, so that a difference in which body types are unsweetened could not produce the result on its own. The carbohydrate column is total carbohydrate from the recipe sheet. It is not a sugar measurement. For context we used two published sources on where sugar comes from rather than how much a shake holds. Te Morenga, Mallard and Mann (BMJ 2013) pooled trials of dietary sugars, defining free sugars as those added to foods plus sugars in honey, syrups and fruit juices, and found that lowering them was associated with a small weight decrease of 0.80 kg in adults eating ad libitum diets. Muraki and colleagues (BMJ 2013) followed three large cohorts and found that total whole fruit had a hazard ratio of 0.98 for type 2 diabetes per three servings a week, while fruit juice had 1.08. Both papers treat the source of the carbohydrate as part of the question. Neither one measures a blended shake, so we use them for framing only. This note builds on LAB #013, which asked whether a sweetener adds sugar.
Results
The 48 unsweetened shakes average 43.9 g of carbohydrate. The 153 sweetened shakes average 38.1 g, a gap of 5.8 g in the wrong direction for a sweetener-driven story. Calories are nearly identical, 376.4 against 374.5, and protein is 33.2 g against 33.0 g. Fat runs the other way: 8.5 g in the unsweetened group against 10.7 g. Five point eight grams of carbohydrate is about 23 kcal and 2.2 g of fat is about 20 kcal, which is why the calorie totals barely move. The Fruit & Vegetable slot explains the carbohydrate. It weighs an average of 125 g in the unsweetened shakes and 82 g in the sweetened ones, 43 g more. Inside each of the eight body-type codes the unsweetened shakes still carry more carbohydrate, by amounts ranging from 1.5 g (WY) to 8.6 g (EI). Of the 48, 29 (60%) carry 40 g or more. Of the 153 sweetened shakes, 45 (29%) reach 45 g. Two recipes show the mechanism. EY-W1-ENERGY-005 (Bright Start) has an empty Flavor slot and 181.9 g of produce: kiwi 44.4 g, Asian pear 85 g, cherry 42.5 g and dates 10 g. It lists 55.6 g of carbohydrate, 4.8 g of fat, 33.4 g of protein and 390.4 kcal. EY-W4-CALM-008 (Unwind Fully) has 30 g of spinach, 55 g of avocado and 1 g of monk fruit, and lists 10.5 g of carbohydrate, 19.3 g of fat, 30.7 g of protein and 331.2 kcal. The shake with no sweetener is the one that carries five times the carbohydrate.
What Failed
The sweetener itself is not one thing. Monk fruit shakes (48 of them, by coincidence the same count) average 34.2 g of carbohydrate and honey shakes 34.0 g, both below the unsweetened 43.9 g. Agave averages 40.8 g and maple syrup 41.5 g. EY-W2-DETOX-003 (Clean Slate) adds 5 g of maple syrup and lists 55.7 g of carbohydrate, higher than the unsweetened EY-W2-DETOX-010 (Open Air) at 52.5 g. So the comparison depends on which sweeteners are in the sweetened group, and the headline gap would shrink if we compared against agave and maple alone. The pattern is also not universal. Four unsweetened shakes list under 30 g of carbohydrate. WY-W4-RENEWAL-003 (Clear Renewal) has 30 g of beet as its only produce and lists 17.8 g. Inside WY the gap is only 1.5 g. We cannot claim the fruit replaced the sweetener. Recipes are built per body type, and body types differ in how many shakes are unsweetened (9 of 30 for EY, 4 of 26 for WAY). Controlling for body type narrows that confound but does not remove it, and we never measured sugars separately. Finally, the unsweetened shakes score 14.3 on our internal Score against 15.2 for the sweetened ones. Carbohydrate correlates with Score at only r = -0.18 across all 201 recipes, so we do not read that 0.9-point gap as a penalty for being unsweetened, and with 48 recipes we would not trust it either way.
What We Learned
An empty Flavor slot describes the slot, not the shake. In 60% of the unsweetened recipes the carbohydrate sits at 40 g or more, and it is carried by produce, not by an added sweetener. The ingredient list looks cleaner, and the label is not lighter. A reader who chooses the shakes with no added sweetener to cut carbohydrate would, on average in our recipe set, be choosing the higher-carbohydrate group. The informative number is the carbohydrate line, read beside the produce weight. Your body type still decides which recipes you see, and the quiz at /body-type-quiz is how that match is made.
What Changed at MOMS
We now read the Flavor slot and the Fruit & Vegetable slot together when we formulate. When the produce slot is heavy with fruit or includes dried fruit, we treat an empty Flavor slot as deliberate rather than as missing. Where a recipe is described as having no added sweetener, the total carbohydrate figure is shown beside that wording so it cannot be read as a low-carbohydrate claim. In the next formulation round we will review the unsweetened recipes at 40 g or more of carbohydrate to see whether a smaller portion of the sweetest produce would hold flavor with less carbohydrate.
References
Te Morenga L, Mallard S, Mann J. Dietary sugars and body weight: systematic review and meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials and cohort studies. BMJ. 2013;346:e7492. | Muraki I, Imamura F, Manson JE, Hu FB, Willett WC, van Dam RM, Sun Q. Fruit consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: results from three prospective longitudinal cohort studies. BMJ. 2013;347:f5001.
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