Questions About Eating Fruit On Keto

#1

So I know fruit is really high in carbs and we’re supposed avoid most fruit on keto. I’ve been on keto for a month and I haven’t had one piece of fruit and I really don’t want to cut out so much fruit from my life. I know like raspberries is said to be ok on keto but its too expensive. But grapes for instance is cheap and they’re said to have about .5g of carbs in one grape. So my thinking is I could eat 20 grapes for a total of 10g of carbs and I’ll be good. My daily carb intake is 15g or less and pretty much all my carbs come from vegetables. So what I want to do is alterante days where one day I eat vegetables and one day I eat fruit but never both in the same day so I don’t go over my carb limit.

So anyway my question is when eating fruit do I just count carbs or do I have to include sugar or is sugar included in the carb count?

Another question. Am I needlessly freaking out about not eating enough fruit on keto? I feel like it would be good to get some of the vitamins and nutrients in fruit and not just cut it out from my diet almost completely.

(MooBoom) #2

This video gives you a really really sound insight into the relevance of fruit in our diets. I think once you’ve seen it you might re-think the grape thing.

https://youtu.be/L6LL92Zs5L0

Btw I eat half a cup of organic berries most days with no issue whatsoever but that’s as far as I push it :blush:

(Full Metal KETO AF) #3

Fruit is BAD! Loaded with sugar and minimal nutrients that you can’t get from veggies. I only eat berries occasionally.

(Janelle) #4

Yeah, no. I wouldn’t do grapes. I agree - berries are expensive. I look for the 2 for 1 sales and also buy them at Costco. My husband eats far more of them than I do and loses more weight so it’s an individual thing for sure. If you’re really craving fruit, some sparking waters (La Croix) might hit the spot at zero carbs.

(Karen) #5

Appolgies to all who have already seen this

(MooBoom) #6

I linked it above too. Can’t be shared enough!

(Karen) #7

Whoops! Just scrolled to the bottom and replied. My bad.

(John) #8

I’d avoid grapes, certainly. Very high in sugar content. I do routinely eat berries. Blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, even some blueberries. Usually one of those is on sale at the grocery store every time I go in, so that’s what I buy that week. I usually limit my daily intake to about 2-3 oz per day (1/3 to 1/2 of a 6-oz tray). Lemon and lime are on my shopping list too. I usually squeeze half of one into a 2L water container for some flavor.

People have different carb tolerances. I recommend trying to stay strict for the first 6 to 12 weeks before starting to experiment with off-plan foods.

(Carl Keller) #9

Or you can eat 2 teaspoons of sugar and accomplish the exact same affect on your blood glucose level. 2 teaspoons of sugar and 3.5 ounces of grapes have approximately the same glycemic index. GI is the a number from 0 to 100 assigned to a food, with pure glucose arbitrarily given the value of 100, which represents the relative rise in the blood glucose level two hours after consuming that food

I would say modern fruit is bad but it wasn’t always as bad as it is now. Through cross-breeding and manipulating traits, current fruit tastes and resembles nothing like the fruit that was around 100+ years ago.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #10

Berries can be expensive, but we shouldn’t be eating enough for it to be a very significant expense. You’re not buying chips, cookies, cakes, pastries, donuts, bread, muffins or pies anymore. What’s a couple of dollars per week for a box of berries? And you’re getting what you pay for, berries are dense nutritionally compared to something like grapes.

#11

Appreciate the reply. But let me ask my question another way.

So are fruit carbs worse than vegetable carbs? For instance, is there a difference between 10g of carbs from fruit and 10g of carbs from vegetables? If I ate a little bit of fruit totaling 10g of carbs and that’s all the carbs I ate that day, is that different or worse than if I ate 10g of carbs worth of vegetables.

#12

Thanks for the info.

(Carl Keller) #13

From a keto point of view, the higher the glycemic index, the more a food causes your blood glucose to go up and the more active insulin is to counteract the high blood glucose. This is why if we can keep our BG as stable as possible, weight loss is easier.

Eating fat and protein doesn’t affect BG and insulin responses very much, if at all. So given all of that, vegetable sugars generally have a lower glycemic index than fruits. Things like potatoes, corn and carrots have a lot of natural sugars and should be avoided if you are trying to keep carb counts low. But certainly we can include vegetables in our way of eating. In fact, most, if not all, of your carbs should be from vegetables and maybe lower carb fruits like avocados and some berries.

The vegetables listed below are some of the lowest carb ones you can eat.

Vegetable Amount Net Carbs
Spinach (Raw) 1/2 Cup 0.1
Bok Choi (Raw) 1/2 Cup 0.2
Lettuce (Romaine) 1/2 Cup 0.2
Cauliflower (Steamed) 1/2 Cup 0.9
Cabbage (Green Raw) 1/2 Cup 1.1
Cauliflower (Raw) 1/2 Cup 1.4
Broccoli (Florets) 1/2 Cup 2
Collard Greens 1/2 Cup 2
Kale (Steamed) 1/2 Cup 2.1
Green Beans (Steamed) 1/2 Cup 2.9
(bulkbiker) #14

You look pretty young so fruit for you would probably be fine… however fructose goes straight to the liver where it can start to build up visceral fat stores which isn’t great when you get older and can start to screw with your metabolism.
You said that berries are pricey but have you looked for frozen? That’s what I get for a rare treat (although not at the moment as I’m trying out carnivore). You can just leave them in the freezer then grab a few when you fancy… no waste and always on hand and here in the UK a lot cheaper too.

(Frank) #15

Berries can certainly be more expensive up front than other fruit. I have made the conscious decision to sacrifice other expenses in my life to fuel my body with the best food I can get within my budget. I like berries and they help me maintain my diet by giving me that variety that my pallet craves. Maybe I’m not buying grass fed beef so that I can afford the berries. I hope to get to the point that the best of everything can be purchased without thought to budget, but that’s not the reality for me or for most people.

(KCKO, KCFO 🥥) #16

What is your reason for eating keto? If it is to control your blood sugar, I wouldn’t eat grapes. Try eating them and taking your BS measurements to see the effect it has on you. We are all different, maybe you can eat that small amount with bumping up too high, maybe not, you have to experiment to find out.

Try eating the 10 grams of grapes and compare that to 10 grams of vegetable carbs. See how you feel and how long the fruit grams help you control hunger if it is weight loss you are after.

If you must have fruit and want to eat a variety of them, then consider paleo style eating, with a time limited eating window, that should help.

My fruits are berries, avocado, and tomatoes. Those work for me. I am in maintenance and have worked up to about 50 carb grams /per day. A couple of times a year, I will share an apple with my husband as a treat. Last time I did it I found it not nearly as great as I remembered apples to be. We have an apple tree, Golden Delicious, and they are now way sweeter than I can handle.

Good luck sorting it all out.

#17

I steer clear of fruit because I’m saving up my carbs for this summer’s biggest berry of all — watermelon.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #18

Ten grams of digestible carbohydrate from broccoli, say, is all glucose. Unless your metabolism is badly messed up, you can afford the spike in blood glucose, because it will not be enough to trigger a significant rise in your insulin level, which is what this whole way of eating is trying to avoid.

Fruit, on the other hand, contains a lot of sucrose and fructose. Sucrose (table sugar) is a glucose molecule bonded to a fructose molecule, so you are getting about the same amount of glucose in your blood. But while glucose can be used for fuel by practically every cell in the body, fructose can be metabolized only in the liver. The metabolic pathway the liver uses to deal with fructose is the same one it uses for alcohol, with the same long-term health consequences resulting from over-consumption of fructose as from over-consumption of alcohol: fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, eventually death from liver failure.

Alcohol causes short-term consequences in the body that fructose does not, but in every other way, their effect on the body is the same. Fructose causes the same dopamine response in the brain as alcohol, with the same results for addiction in the vulnerable. (This is why recovering alcoholics often fight their alcohol addiction by turning to sugar in its place.)

You will notice that the keto-friendly fruits (berries, mostly) contain a higher proportion of fiber. Fiber is carbohydrate, but it is indigestible, and so it blocks the absorption of fructose and glucose through the wall of the intestines. In the case of fructose, this is especially valuable, because the liver can safely handle only so much at a time, and the fiber slows down the rate of absorption of fructose to something the liver can handle. Likewise, the glucose part of the sugar is also slowed down, and the resulting blood sugar spike is lessened, further reducing the likelihood of an insulin response. (This would also be true of the fiber in the broccoli, of course.)

Fruit juice, by the way, is deadly for anyone on a ketogenic diet, because it lacks fiber and packs a wallop of both fructose and glucose. This means they both hit the system in a rush, having a much greater and deadlier impact.

#19

I’ve never been much of a fruit fan apart from avocados and tomatoes, berries, and fermented grapes but… Dr. Robert Lustig (the one who’s researched a lot on sugar as poison, specifically HFCS) got my attention when in one of his filmed presentations he talks about how fibrous whole fruits like apples and pears are unique. Because they have both the “poison” (fructose/carbs) and the medicine (fiber, which holds the fructose so it’s not dumped into the bloodstream by the stomach - and pectin, and antioxidants for cellular health).

And in ayurveda, the natural sweet taste and sun-charged hydration found in certain foods like fibrous fruits can be restorative and rejuvenative to the brains & bodies of certain constitutions (esp midlife and older females, according to expert low carb nutritionist Ann Louise Gittleman PhD, author of the low-carb Radical Metabolism).

Fibrous fruits modulate the speed of digestion of the fructose so that it’s basically not metabolized - it instead is bound to the fiber and taken to the the large intestine when then feeds the good bacteria that thrive on it (the fiber works as a resistant starch). And then these good bacteria are the ones that produce enormous amounts of butyrate which boosts the brain’s ketone production. There are apparently a number of amazing processes and nutrients in play with apples and pears, even modern hybridized ones, and the antioxidants have been linked to preventing metabolic syndrome :green_apple: :pear:

When Dr. Lustig explained the digestive process and the ancient cultural values & metaphors placed on fruition and such, my gut wanted some fruit/sunshine and so I did like Eve and ATE THE APPLE and was filled with gratitude & knowledge about how the fertility of the living land nourishes my own vitality with modest servings of fibrous fruit (preferably from permaculture small farms or organic). There’s a rejuvenating/uplifting quality I like about this new intake of a little more fresh fruit in my life apart from my summer smoothies - my n=1 on this feels really refreshing in the belly, and aligned with recomp. I just had another nice swoosh and am progressing in recomp measurements-wise… much appreciated at age 53. :blush:

I’ve been experimenting lately with incorporating one room temp (unrefrigerated, and much more pleasant to eat) apple or pear a day, several days a week - eaten with tasty bleu cheese dressing dip or pecan pie almond butter. SO flavorful! I only started this thing with fibrous fruit beyond berries after more than a year keto, after a significant time of being fat-adapted and not as an IR person - I wouldn’t recommend this to newbies.

Interestingly, since becoming low-carb/keto, my palate now enjoys green Granny Smith apples and they taste sweet, whereas before, I considered them tart n’ terrible and really disliked them unless making a pie with tons of sugar :woman_shrugging:t4:

And, having one piece of a larger fibrous fruit like pear or apply per day is really different than the SAD advisory to have… 2-4 (with orange juice/sugar water somehow considered fruit, etc). My daily net carbs stay around 50-70 - and I’m not even sure that fruit carbs in moderation even count at this point for non-IR folks, due to the digestive alchemy a la Lustig.

#20

Wow, you have an actual apple tree! That’s very special. When I was a child, I had grandparents that lived with a huge apple tree in front of their little house, and I loved the blossoms, and everything about it.

Since the Golden Delicious tree is there… a sweet apple might be amazingly counterbalanced if eaten with some kind of spicy dip base like cottage cheese or nut butter containing sriracha or red chilli powder & paprika or curry powder & salt seasoning. Because the chilli taste reduces, or counterbalances, sweet! It’s a cultural cuisine thing in the global south, where they eat fresh fruit like mango with chilli, and also watermelon with salt - to contrast tastes. Some surprising, and even wonderful new things happen with certain contrasts! Personally, I adore the sweet-hot taste the most. And another way to do it is salty-pungent with sweet, as in sweet apple slices with a robust cheese (like worcestshire sriracha, or shallot cheddar), or Phinney & Volek’s bleu cheese dressing which is amaaaazing with sweet apple slices - at least for my palate!