Negative "net carb" wraps... really???

A friend of mine at work wants to low carb for a while, and we got to talking about my eating plan.  I told her about my dinner last night, which consisted of half of a pizza I made on a low carb tortilla.

She proceeds to tell me about these "negative carb" tortillas... supposedly they have five grams of carbs, but 12 grams of fiber.  I told her that didn't make sense... that surely they meant five grams of net carbs?  She kept firmly insisting that this was not the case, that they have a negative "net carb" count.

Um... how would that even be possible?  I thought the formula for figuring net carbs was total carbs minus fiber?  As in, fiber is part of the original number of total carbs, right?

I told her it sounded like some kind of marketing gimmick... she is firmly insisting that she is right.

It's scary to me that people won't even listen to logic when it comes to practices that could impact their health, like figuring carbs accurately.  And she's diabetic, so she really needs to be careful with this.

Sigh...

 Well with the math it's
5 - 12 = -6

but in reality how can you have negative carbs, it's not like those carbs are going to eat up the 6 extra carbs floating around in your tiny tum?

Exactly! 

And if fiber is a type of carb, how can the total carbs ever be less than the amount of fiber? 

And yet this same woman is one of those who acts like she knows everything about everything... I can't help but giggle and shudder at the same time.

The true question is what does this negative carb lady look like?

Haha!  Good one! :)

 FWIW, if fiber ate carbs I'd invest stock in Benefiber!!

Bahaha!  Too true :)

Obviously she's a 'tard ass and there are 17 carbs and 12 of them are fiber and so it has 5 net carbs. I guess if something has 12g of fiber and 12g of carbs then it has 0 net carbs but that's still not negative net carbs.

If someone can educate me as to anything different I'm willing to listen and I'd be very excited to learn!

I've seen other stuff online about the NI for those, and she is quoting the label pretty accurately, but the math doesn't add up.  See Marabel's response a little ways down for more info on this.

 She's probably got it backwards, yeah. 12g total, minus 6 fiber, equals 6 net. I've got these tortillas and they're great. They put the fun back in low-carbing and sometimes I use them for a PB sandwich (only SF PB) or a chicken caesar wrap, or even throw some chili in there for an impromptu burrito.