Carb Calculator & Daily Carb Budget
Search 176 foods curated with exact glycemic index data — the same database that powers GlucoBeacon — plus live results from the USDA's food database for anything else. Calculate net carbs from a nutrition label, or get a personalized daily carb target. Free to everyone, forever.
What should my daily carb intake be?
A personalized starting point based on your stats, activity, and goal — not just a single food.
This is a general educational estimate (Mifflin-St Jeor + your chosen carb approach), not a medical prescription. If you take insulin or have a carb ratio from your doctor or dietitian, follow that instead — it accounts for your specific medications and labs in a way a formula can't.
Search a food
Start typing — try "banana," "white rice," or "chicken breast." Our 176 curated foods come first with full glycemic index data; broader results pull live from the USDA's public food database.
Or calculate manually
Have a nutrition label in front of you? Enter the numbers directly.
Formula: Net Carbs = Total Carbs − Fiber − (Sugar Alcohols ÷ 2). This is the most common convention, though how much a sugar alcohol actually affects your blood sugar varies by type and by person — if you use a CGM, your own logged data is the real answer.
What are net carbs, and why do they matter?
Not every gram of carbohydrate on a label hits your bloodstream the same way. "Net carbs" is an attempt to estimate the portion that actually does.
Fiber isn't digested
Your body can't break fiber down into glucose, so it doesn't raise blood sugar the way starch or sugar does — subtracting it gives a more honest picture of a food's real impact.
Sugar alcohols are partial
Ingredients like erythritol or xylitol are absorbed differently than regular sugar — typically less, but not zero, and it varies by type and by person.
Glycemic index adds context
Two foods with identical carb counts can raise blood sugar at very different speeds. GI tells you how fast, not just how much.
It's an estimate, not a promise
Net carbs is a useful planning tool, not a guarantee — the only way to know exactly how a food affects you is to check your own blood sugar after eating it.
Where our GI numbers actually come from
Every GI value in our 176-food database traces back to real clinical testing — published, peer-reviewed tables, not a guess. For mixed dishes that were never lab-tested as a whole (nobody has tested "chicken enchiladas" — recipes vary too much), we won't invent a number. The honest method is a carb-weighted average of each ingredient's real GI, and even that documented technique runs 22–50% off a true lab-measured result — so we label composite estimates as estimates, not facts. A lot of GI tools skip this distinction entirely.
Want this to travel with you and log automatically?
GlucoBeacon tracks every reading, meal, and pattern privately on your phone — no account, no cloud.
See what GlucoBeacon does →