The Best Keto Friendly Fruits That Won’t Kick You Out of Ketosis
On the ketogenic diet people still tend to think that fruits are treated a little bit differently within the body. This means meaning that they’re okay to have some fruit because “it’s not a typical carbohydrate”.
So there are two reasons why I put this article together:
To help clear up some confusion surrounding fructose and glucose metabolism.
To help give you an idea of some of the fruits that you can consume on a ketogenic diet even if it’s just in moderation
You see generally speaking people tend to look at fruit a little bit different. Sometimes they put it in an entirely different box as far as carbohydrates are concerned.
They think because it’s fruit or because it’s natural then it’s not a real carbohydrate in that it won’t affect them on a ketogenic level. However it’s actually quite the opposite. Fruit can affect ketosis significantly more because it hits closer to home as far as the liver is concerned.
When it comes down to ketosis, one of the cardinal things that we have to remember is that ketones are produced in the liver so anything that is affecting the liver is going to have a dramatic impact on our ketone production. Fructose is metabolized predominantly within the liver.
There are two different types of carbohydrates that we consume on regular basis:
we have good old-fashioned glucose and
then we have fructose which comes from fruit.
Glucose is used by virtually every single cell in the body whether you’re in ketosis or not every cell has the capability of utilizing glucose. On the other hand, fructose can only be metabolized in the liver. Fructose can not be used by every cell in the body. Fructose can really only actively be processed and metabolized within the liver.
So right then and there it hits closer to home as far as ketosis is concerned. Whenever we consume regular carbohydrates that are not coming from fruit the liver only has to take about 20% of the brunt of the load. However, when we’re consuming fruit, the liver has to take 100 percent of the brunt of the load.
When it comes down to restoring what’s called liver glycogen the carbohydrates that are stored in the liver it’s a lot easier to store carbohydrates in the liver from fruit than it is from other carbohydrates and when it comes down to producing ketones we need the liver to be complete depleted of glycogen or as close to it as possible in order to produce the maximum amount of ketones now keep in mind here since glucose can be used by every cell in the body when we consume glucose we have an ability to burn it up really fast but since the body can’t use fructose whenever we consume fructose it has a tendency to get turned into free fatty acids and triglycerides and ultimately fat significantly easier so whenever we consume carbs our body takes glucose again the simple sugars that come from regular carbohydrates and it strings them together and it strings them together into something known as a glycogen and then it stores in a couple different places it takes them and it stores them on the shelves within our muscles within our skeletal muscle system and then some of it it takes it’s stores within our liver but there’s two distinct jobs you see the skeletal muscle tissue does something different when it’s glycogen in the liver does the job of the glycogen or the carbohydrates that are stored in the liver is simply to maintain blood sugar we’re trying to keep our blood glucose levels elevated enough so that we constantly have enough energy now when it comes down to the muscle glycogen those carbohydrates that are stored are used only whenever were exerting energy for activity so for example if you were to break into a sprint and you needed energy you’d pull up from the muscle tissue but if you just needed regular blood glucose levels to be elevated for traditional life you’d pull it from the liver so what ends up happening is once we burn through all the liver glycogen all the carbs that are stored in the liver our body has the ability to produce ketones so you see a lot of things out there that say you have to go through your entire carbohydrate stores before you ever start to burn carbohydrates and even though there is some truth to that it’s an overgeneralization to try to make ketosis make a little bit more sense in reality all you have to do is burn through your liver glycogen first in fact even when you’re in ketosis your levels of muscle glycogen are still elevated because you’re not really tapping into them unless you’re doing heavy weight training or high-intensity interval training so you’re really just trying to burn through the liver glycogen but knowing that we’re always topping off the tank with fruit and we’re never giving the body the chance to actually create ketones whereas if we were to consume regular carbs those are generally going to a different tank so we have more of an implication that can occur as far as stopping ketone production by eating fruit than we do by eating straight-up sugar not saying you should do either one now when it comes down to the actual metabolism of fructose it’s pretty interesting and I’m gonna give you an overall analogy to help it make some sense you see fructose ends up using something called facilitated diffusion it uses the active transport chain and it takes in sugar two completely different way so I want you to imagine for a second that you are consuming at the same time a strawberry in a little bit of pasta okay what’s gonna happen is the pasta has glucose the strawberry has fructose it’s gonna enter your mouth the same way then it’s gonna go into your digestive system and when it goes into your small intestine it’s going to reach a point where it needs to absorb well at this point I want you to visualize two buses okay the glucose from the pasta he’s gonna get on one bus and the fructose from the strawberry gets on a completely different bus but that bus only has the ability to store a few people a few molecules of strawberry it’s a smaller bus okay the bus that the glucose can get on is big and it can carry a lot okay the small bus goes straight to the liver the big bus goes throughout the rest of the body and delivers glucose and does some other things so you can see at that point how it’s actually metabolized entirely differently within the body now there was actually a study that was published in the annals of nutrition that put this into an interesting perspective as far as exercise is concerned what they wanted to look at was how did fructose compare to glucose when it came down to post exercise in actual recovery well it was pretty interesting see after two hours they found that a little bit of fructose actually did allow a little bit of skeletal muscle recovery but glucose did the bulk of the work but after four hours post exercise they found that almost all the fructose had restored liver glycogen but hadn’t touched muscle glycogen therefore meaning that if you were to eat fruit post-workout you’re not even stimulating your recovery you’re adding it to the liver and that’s about it so if you’re on a ketogenic diet and you were to suddenly just eat a bunch of fruit post-workout you would be much more likely to kick yourself out of ketosis than if you were to have a couple grams of regular carbs again not saying you should do either/or so let’s get to which fruits you could have in small amounts on a ketogenic diet and let me say this as a preamble to all of this you don’t need to have fruits yeah I’m doing this video because a lot of people say they’ve truly miss fruits okay the first one I want to talk about it’s gonna be avocado something you’re going to turn off the video right now this is a joke avocados a fat well here’s the thing avocado is a fat and it’s higher in fat than it is in carbs but it’s still technically a fruit and the sugar or the carbohydrates that are in avocado are fructose so if you ever notice that if you’re having a bunch of guacamole or a bunch of avocados that your ketone levels might read a little bit lower well that’s because that fructose is going straight to the liver so you don’t want to go overboard on the avocado in fact I usually recommend no more than one whole avocado a day while you’re on a ketogenic diet okay then the next one we can talk about are going to be blackberries here’s the cool thing about blackberries overall the net carbs are pretty darn low we’re talking six to seven grams of net carbs in about a cup now overall you’re still going to have 15 to 20 grams of carbohydrates when you count fiber and you count some of these other things but what I want you to realize is that you could have a small amount maybe a quarter cup or so without ever having a problem you might temporarily stunt your ketone levels but since it’s so low glycemic and has such a high fiber content it’s gonna absorb slow enough that you shouldn’t have too much of an issue so then we’ve got raspberries which are in kind of a similar ballpark right they still have that same slow digesting metabolism that’s gonna allow them to be broken down a little bit slower they still have a high amount of fiber so it’s breaking down a little bit slower but again they still have the fructose that’s gonna contribute to liver glycogen so we want to keep it to about a quarter cup yeah nothing crazy but if it gets your sweet tooth satisfied a little bit it’s better than loading up on a bunch of artificial sweeteners then we have strawberries same ballpark except strawberries you can go a little bit higher because a little bit higher water quantity so since there’s more water in them of course the sugars gonna seem a little bit less in terms of volume so you can have maybe a half a cup or so of strawberries but make sure that you’re not slicing them so that the surface area isn’t compacting and you’re ending up with ultimately more like a cup okay now I want to clear one thing up before I wrap this video up to it insulin is not always the issue okay when we look at fruit and we look at carbohydrates in general we always say oh it’s gonna create an insulin spike and we’re not going to be able to be in ketosis because we’re secreting insulin not always the case okay insulin is not the end-all be-all we still have levels of insulin that are elevated even on a ketogenic diet if we look at a type 1 diabetic for instance the reason that a type 1 diabetic could ever go into ketoacidosis is because even when ketones are elevated if they don’t have insulin to allow those ketones into something then you end up with keto as dosis so we still need insulin so it’s not the fact the fruit is causing an insulin spike it’s more about what’s happening in the way of the liver glycogen and what’s happening in the way of how the liver prioritizes metabolism of certain things if fructose is coming in then the liver has to prioritize metabolism of that and not creating ketone bodies as always if you have ideas for future videos you want to learn a little bit more about the foods you can and can’t eat on a ketogenic diet make sure that you comment below and let me know because this is how I learn what kind of videos I should create and what kind of videos are gonna be the best performing topics here on youtube and also on other channels so keep it locked in here on my channel I’ll see you in the next video
