The 16 Best Low Carb Vegetables- Eat as Much as You Want

In this article I’m going to take you through 16 of the best low carb vegetables. All the vegetables in this video are so low in carbohydrate that you can pretty much eat as much as you want, even on the most restrictive of low-carb diets, such as the ketogenic diet.

Now all the vegetables in this video contain less than five grams of net carbs per 100 grams of food and net carbs are the digestible bit that our bodies actually can use for energy.

It’s a really low amount of carbs, which means you’re more than likely be full before you start to overeat these foods. And as you’ve probably noticed, I’m British, which means we call some of our vegetables by different names from pretty much most of the rest of the world. I’ll try and use the common international names for these things, but hopefully it should be obvious from the pictures what I’m talking about.

Courgette/ Zucchini

This member of the squash family is particularly low in carbohydrates and it’s really versatile. Compared to other members of the squash family, such as pumpkin’s, which have 6.5 g of net carbs and butternut squash, which has 10g, courgettes have just 2.1g net carbs per 100 grams.

You can roast them, fry them, grill them, but they’re perhaps most famous in the low-carb world as an alternative to pasta.

You can use a spiralizer to turn courgettes into spaghetti, which we call courgetti, but I guess if you call courgette zucchini, I guess zoodles works just as well. You can try this courgetti bolognese recipe or if you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, then use them as a noodle substitute in this ramen noodle recipe.

Aubergines/ Eggplants

Now these can be cooked in a variety of ways, I love them because they suck up the flavor from everything around them. My favorite way to cook them is to cut them into thin slices and use them as a substitute for the lasagna sheets.

Asparagus

This vegetable has such incredible flavor, especially if you can get it locally produced and in season. It makes a great low-carb side dish, steamed, sauteed, barbecued. It makes a fantastic accompaniment for steak.

Broccoli

Now this might seem like a pretty boring vegetable, especially if it’s just boiled or steamed, but there’s loads of great ways you can cook broccoli that make it much more exciting.

Stir-fry it, roast it, or even blend it up into a soup.

Mushrooms

Love them or hate them, mushrooms are very low in carbs. I always try to keep some in the fridge, garlic mushrooms are a great tasty side dish, just saute them with some butter and some garlic. I mix mushrooms with some cheese as the stuffing for an omelet or make a lovely creamy mushroom sauce to go with steak.

Peppers

Now, fun fact, red peppers are just ripe green peppers, they go through yellow on the way to get there. And the ripening process means that more sugars will be present in the flesh of peppers.

Green peppers are a really solid low-carb choice at 3g net carbs, whereas red and yellow peppers only just make this list at 5g per 100g.

You can slice them up and eat them raw in salads or fry them up as part of this awesome beef fajita dish.

Avocado

Avocados are one of my low-carb superfoods. They’re just loaded with healthy fats and are perfect in salads, blended in smoothies for an extra creamy texture or squashed up to make guacamole. If you have never tried making guacamole at home, it’s really easy and it’s so much better than the shop-bought stuff. There’s a recipe for it as part of the beef fajitas recipe that I mentioned earlier, so make sure you check that out. And all the recipes, by the way are available on the website.

Is it a Vegetable or a Fruit?

Before we go any further, I want to talk about the elephant in the room. Not all of these vegetables are technically vegetables. Yeah, it’s true. Some of them are actually technically fruits, but we talk about them as vegetables because they have similar nutritional profiles to vegetables, even though they’re not.

But here’s a little challenge for you, let me know in the comments down below which of the items on this list, is technically neither a vegetable or a fruit? Be a fungi and drop me a message in the comments below.

Tomato

Again, it’s not a vegetable, but it is a fruit. Lots of people seem to get upset about tomatoes on low-carb diets and I’m not really sure why that is. Yeah, there are certain varieties which are a bit sweeter than others and may have a slightly higher carb count, but most are pretty low in carbs.

And of course, there’s hundreds of different ways that you can use tomatoes such as raw in salads or cooked, but beware of sun dried tomatoes.

For the same reason that we avoid dried fruits, the sugars that are there are just so much more concentrated in anything that’s been dried.

Cabbage

Now cabbages don’t have to be boring, you know? Shredded cabbages can form the bases for coleslaw and work really well as a sort of noodle substitute for low-carb stir-frys. These can be seriously tasty.

Olives

Whether you love them or hate them, they feature in quite a lot of our recipes here at Carb Dodging, but olives are often my go-to snack on the road because you can usually pick up a small pot in pretty much most supermarkets very easily.

Green leafy vegetables

By green leafy vegetables, I mean things like spinach, spring greens, kale, those kind of things. I’m not going to go into detail in this one because they’re not exactly the most inspiring out of all of these vegetables, but they are super low in carbs and full of important nutrients. Whether you decide to cook them or blend them into smoothies, they’re always something we can get more of in our diets.

Lettuce and Cucumber

I’m going to talk about these two together, because they’re not overly exciting on their own, but they form the base of amazing salads, which you can eat to your heart’s content on a low-carb diet.

Radishes

This vegetable is one that I think is frequently overlooked as a great low-carb option. This includes the radishes’ Oriental cousin, the daikon radish or mooli.

I always used to think of using radishes in salads and we’ve used them in this awesome salmon Nicoise salad, but they can also be roasted and stir-fried, get creative with them.

Green beans

These were also used in the salmon Nicoise salad. You can use them in salad, stir-frys or as a side dish. But they also work really well for meal prep foods because once cooked, they can be stored really well in the fridge for a few days.

Cauliflower

I may have saved the best till last. Cauliflower is quite possibly the king or queen of low-carb vegetables.

It can be mashed as a potato substitute, blend it with Parmesan and use it to top off this amazing shepherd’s pie.

It can even be used as a pizza base, and if cauliflower can be used for pizza then anything is possible!

If you’ve one, pulse it up in a blender, or chop it up finely, or even grate it and use it as a low-carb rice substitute. And I just love to chunk it up into florets or steaks and roast it in the oven with some salt, pepper, and oil.

It’s such a quick, easy and tasty side dish.

So that is the list of my top 16 low carb vegetables and hopefully a bit of inspiration about how to use those in various recipes. And all the recipes that I’ve mentioned are available on the website

Knowing which foods are lower carb options and which are higher carb options is half the battle when you’re starting out on a low-carb diet.

So I’ve put together this downloadable cheat booklet, which tells you the low carb contents of most of the common foods you’ll find in the supermarkets. There’s a traffic light system to show you which foods are all good, which you need to be careful with the quantity and which you should avoid altogether in order to be successful on a low-carb diet.

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