Which are THE BEST low carb fruits for YOUR ketogenic diet?
In this article I’m going to take you through the best fruits for a low carb or ketogenic diet. By the end you will know which fruits you can eat and which you might need to be a bit more careful of. It’s a controversial topic.
This is important because it is an area where I see a lot of mistakes being made by people who are new to low carb or ketogenic diets.
Cutting fruits can be a difficult mindset for a lot of people to accept because fruits have, for a long time, had this reputation of being great for our health.
And if you’re someone who’s never been overweight and are metabolically healthy, then yes, you may well be able to eat whatever fruit you want without any issues.
However, we’re now realizing that being overweight simply isn’t just a problem of overeating, there’s a degree of metabolic damage that goes along with it.
So I’m not saying that fruits are simply bad, but if you’re trying to lose weight on a low carb diet then you’ll probably need to be mindful of your fruit intake in order to be successful
Table of Contents
Haven’t humans always eaten fruit?
I know I won’t have convinced everybody that fruits should be restricted because, well, haven’t humans always eaten fruits? But just consider this. In the modern world fruits are not what they used to be. Many modern fruits have been selectively bred to be more palatable and easier to eat than their naturally occurring versions. And that means they have a higher sugar content and a much lower fibre content. Compare these two images of naturally occuring banana versus a modern banana
Supply of fruit
And the supply of our fruits has changed. Think about where you live. Do fruits grow in the wild all year round? Fruits are typically seasonal and therefore we wouldn’t naturally have year round access to fruits such as we do due to modern agricultural techniques and international fruit shipping.
Now, if you saw my last video about low-carb vegetables, then you’ll know that I set the threshold for what I called a low carb vegetable at five grams of net carbs per hundred grams. And there are a few items in there which were technically fruits in the botanical sense, such as tomatoes, avocados, and members of the squash family. But we’re talking about fruits in the culinary sense here. And unfortunately there aren’t many fruits that hit that same threshold.
Berries
Lemons
Coconut Flesh
Melon
Peaches and Apricots
Higher Carb Fruits
The carb counts just keep going up from here. At 10g net carbs per 100g we find oranges, plums and cherries. At 11g, we’ve already mentioned them, blueberries. At 12g we find apples, pears, kiwis, and pineapples. At 13g we find mangoes.
Jump up to 16g we find grapes, which I’ve always thought were better consumed as wine anyway. Right up to bananas at 20g of net carbs per 100g.
Better option than others?
I hope this has been useful. But before I go I just want to put this into a bit of context.
All these fruits, even grapes and bananas, are still way below the carb content of many of the sugar-filled snacks that we encounter on a day-to-day basis, and are far better than reaching for dried fruits like raisins which have about 75g of net carbs per 100g.
The same goes for fruit juices and fruit smoothies, which are similar in their sugar content to full sugar sodas.
Other videos and Downloadable Resources
Check out my other video “What Can I Eat on a Low Carb Diet?”
Or if you want a downloadable resource then we’ve put together a guide to the carb content in different foods, which includes fruit, nuts, vegetables. And we’ve covered some of the more tricky areas such as seafoods, as well as low carb drinks and alcohol.
