@PammyB
There are quite a few recipes in our Recipes forum that you can try. There are also Web sites that provide ketogenic recipes, such as Harlan Kilstein and the Diet Doctor site (I believe that you have to pay a small membership fee to get access to the recipes, since they don’t accept advertising). In all cases, I would strongly urge you to figure out the carb content per the serving size you are likely to eat—some of recipes I’ve seen are “low-carb” only if you eat a couple of grams, lol! In all cases, however, you are better off making your own recipes than buying a commercial product that claims to be “keto.”
The main sweetener in diet sodas is aspartame. If you do some research on the Web, you will find that aspartame is (a) perfectly harmless and (b) the Devil’s spawn, and just waiting to give you horrible cancers, destroy your thyroid, eat your brain, and so forth. It’s very hard to tell at this juncture how much of these claims are solid research and how much is junk science paid for by industry, whether for or against.
The sugar industry, for example, managed to produce research ostensibly showing that sodium saccharine and sodium cyclamate might possibly cause cancer in rats if they ate a huge enough dose of the stuff. How realistic the cancer risk might be in people is impossible to assess at this point, though it is probably not high, given how desperate the sugar industry was at the time to fight off competition.
I used to be an avid diet soda drinker, until I listened to a doctor who sounded reasonable, and who said that although aspartame was supposed to be safe, she just didn’t trust it. I ended up switching to carbonated water (Pellegrino and Perrier, when I can afford them, the cheapest supermarket Seltzer water or club soda, otherwise).
Some of our members who are sugar addicts feel that they are best off when they avoid sweet tastes, because using such sweeteners can, they find, trigger sugar cravings. From the point of view of most ketonians, however, the main problem with non-sugar sweeteners is that each one of them on the market seems to spike someone’s insulin. The effect seems to be completely individual, and a sweetener that works fine for one person might be a big problem for another person. You have to experiment to see which of those sweeteners you can use without problems.
This insulin effect, BTW, is something scientists are not sure exists, but we have enough anecdotes from people on these forums to suggest otherwise. No research has been done, because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require it. (Manufacturers do have to show that such sweeteners have no effect on blood glucose, or they are not allowed for sale in the U.S.)
One last point, and I’ll stop: from a baker’s point of view, all of these sweeteners behave differently, and it is best to use the sweetener recommended in the recipe, because the recipe will have been worked out properly for that sweetener. If sugar was present in the original recipe only as a sweetener, then you can generally inter-convert between sweeteners (though the calculations can be tricky). But it the sugar has a structural purpose (feeding yeast, say, or reacting with some other ingredient to provide texture), then only certain (if any) non-sugar sweeteners can be used in that recipe.