Because I frequently spend some part of the summer on my annual Tartar Sauce Tour of the Pacific Northwest, inhaling vast quantities of pan-fried oysters, beer-battered razor clams and various parts of that wily crustacean known as a Dungeness crab, I return home with more baggage around the middle than I left with. Let’s just say our gas mileage heading north is considerably better than what we get coming home.

As a result, I spend the better part of September and October on whatever sort of carb-free diet is the current rage. These diets work remarkably well if you can stay on them by denying yourself all the things mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

The mainstay of such a diet — at least for those of us with a sweet tooth — is diet soda. Find one you like and stick with it. Zero carbs, zero calories. Have as many cans a day as you like. Gone are those long-ago days when diet soda was a saccharin-laced mess that was nearly impossible to swallow. With aspartame and sucralose and all sorts of other artificial sweeteners, diet soda today is just as good as the real thing.

And while my favorite under these carb-free circumstances is clearly the flavorful Pepsi Max, it’s important to mix things up every now and then just to keep life interesting.

Thus, the other day I found myself buying a 12-pack of Diet Sunkist Sparkling Lemonade in the handy 12-ounce cans.

Little did I know what a taste sensation it would be, a wonderful change of pace from my Pepsi passion. It was so good, in fact, that I was compelled to look again at the label to be absolutely certain it was indeed “diet” soda.

The label relieved my sudden fear that a forbidden substance was passing my lips and sailing into my carb-starved system.

“Total Fat — 0 g,” it said. “Total Carb. — 0 g,” it added. “Protein — 0 g,” it concluded.

I was in the clear. I could drink to my heart’s content. But just as I was about to call Sunkist and ask if their delivery truck could swing by and drop off several dozen cases in front of my East Davis home, I noticed one final piece of information on the label: “Calories — 10.”

I’m not a nutritionist, but if there is no fat, no protein and absolutely no carbs, where did those 10 calories come from?

Putting on an extra pair of glasses to read the ingredients on the side of the can, I took particular note of “lemon juice concentrate” and “modified food starch.” Now, you can modify food starch all you want, but you’re still going to end up with some sort of carbohydrate. The same for lemon juice concentrate.

“Consumers comments? 1-866-DRINK-ORANGE.”

I dialed the number and was greeted by a cheery voice belonging to a woman named Kelly (name changed to protect the guilty). After promising to “take a look into the product” and putting me on hold, Kelly returned to say “Those 10 calories are coming from vitamins and minerals.”

When I raised a skeptical eyebrow, Kelly added that “If there’s less than 5 grams of fat, protein or carbohydrate, it can be expressed as ‘zero’ under the FDA’s ‘rounding rule.’ ”

In other words, this delightful beverage could have 4 grams of fat, 4 grams of protein and 4 grams of carbs and still proudly proclaim zeroes across the board.

I explained to her that folks like me, who drink thousands of cans of “diet” soda every year, would find it valuable to know that there are actually 4 carbs, instead of none, in their Sparkling Lemonade. Forget what the FDA allows, in the interest of accuracy, not to mention my health, wouldn’t it be just as easy to print a “4” as a “0”?

Fifteen minutes later, I got a call back from Kira, who told me that Kelly was actually wrong about the “rounding rule” and that the 10 calories were the result of “lemon juice and lemon extract” in the product. But she stuck to the party line that there were “no carbs” anywhere in those 12 ounces of Sparkling Lemonade.

The diet continues. As does the search for an occasional alternative to my good friend Pepsi Max.

— Reach Bob Dunning at [email protected]

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