You can't always trust the nutrician panel on products as these are generally estimates. You can trust iodine tho as it's a chemical reaction and will show up even small amounts of starch.
My hubby Jon is VERY sensitive to starch to the point even the smallest amount will cause a reaction etc and he is fine with coconut flour. We buy Niulife Coconut Flour and using your system it says:
Total Carbs per 100g: 64.7g
Of which Sugars = 7.9g
And Fibre = 38.5g
Which would supposedly leave starch as 18.3g
There is NO WAY in hell Jon would be able to eat something that has 18% starch! But he eats coconut flour most day with NO problem.
Actually this is rather encouraging. My last theory was that my local coconut flour was inferior to the stuff you have in NZ, and your stats indicate that's not the case. This is one theory I'm happy to have blown away by evidence.
Now I have 2 new theories, first of which is in agreement with yours
* all the coconut-flour manufacturers are putting inaccurate estimates for nutrition data instead of doing accurate measurements
* any starch starch in coconut flour is present in a non-dangerous form, just like Sinclair mentioned certain vegetables that technically
have starch -- but it is locked up in cellulose unless you cook them
The good thing is that the end result is the same, and I'm going to give coconut flour a try. Preferably before I get my allergy test done, so it can check for coconut allergies (I know a couple people who are allergic to coconut).
One more thing Kiwi (I hope you're not getting too frustrated with me) -- could you provide more details about iodine test accuracy? Although it doesn't matter with respect to the coconut flour, it definitely matters to me when deciding whether to trust a particular piece of fruit or vegetable. I'm very sensitive right now, because the amount of starch from taking a wrong pill or two means trouble.
I've never seen anything quantitative about the accuracy or precision of a home-brew iodine test. Professionals use 0.3% starch solution, but that is ideal conditions where the starch is thoroughly dissolved in water. I'm pretty sure we don't always get that kind of accuracy in more complicated situations where the starch is embedded in solid or goopy foods.
Being the experimental sort, I'm tempted to do a rough assessment of the home iodine test accuracy myself, but clearly that won't work if the posted nutrition data is too inaccurate (otherwise I would find foods that were labeled with 2%, 1%, 0.5% starch, etc and see how clearly they reacted).
