Foods for a keto diet

On a ketogenic diet you take in a few carbohydrates in the form of vegetables, up to 30 grams a day. So that you can eat plenty of them, reach above all for very low carbohydrate vegetables. Anything that is green vegetables, spinach, lettuce, cucumber, is particularly low in carbohydrates. Other kinds such as root vegetables or colourful vegetables contain a little more. That does not mean you cannot eat them, it only means you have to watch the amount and eat a bit less of them, carrots or red pepper for example.

While with vegetables you can reach for almost every kind and only have to vary the amounts, with fruit you have to be a little more careful. All the berries work particularly well. Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. Papaya is also very low in carbohydrates. Less suitable are all the other tropical fruits, pineapple, banana or mango for example. They contain so many carbohydrates that you could only eat 20 to 30 grams of them, which does not make much sense.

On a ketogenic diet you take in most of your energy as fat. High quality saturated fatty acids matter a great deal here, from grass fed butter, from ghee, from high quality fat of grass fed beef or from virgin coconut oil. You also need mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids, from avocado, olive oil, or the valuable omega 3 fatty acids you find in oily sea fish.

The ketogenic diet is not a particularly high protein diet, it contains moderate amounts of protein. The best sources for that are meat, fish and eggs of good quality, grass fed beef or organic eggs for example. The second best choice is dairy, always the full fat version and ideally from pasture milk. The third option is protein powder, collagen protein from grass fed cattle or whey protein powder for instance.

“Keto and carbohydrates”, you may be thinking that cannot be right. It is. On a ketogenic diet you do take in a few carbohydrates, up to 30 grams a day, and you take them in as vegetables or fruit. Ideally that is plenty of green vegetables, a little colourful vegetables and not quite so much fruit. With fruit, berries are very valuable. You also take in carbohydrates through dairy, and even eggs contain a few.

In general dairy is allowed on a ketogenic diet. Always reach for full fat products, watch that the carbohydrate content is not too high, and of course that they are not sweetened. Personally I do not recommend dairy for the start, though, because it contains quite a lot of carbohydrates compared with other protein sources such as meat, fish or eggs, so you can “spend” a lot of carbohydrates on dairy rather quickly. Those are then missing for plenty of vegetables or a little fruit.