10 Healthy Foods You Can’t Eat on the Keto Diet

Staff
By Staff
3 Min Read

The keto diet is known for its extremes. “By nature, the keto diet isn’t fully balanced,” says Keri Glassman, RD, owner of Nutritious Life in New York City. Just look at the ratios in a typical keto diet food list: People on a keto diet aim to eat upward of 80 percent of their calories from fat. They also eat very few carbs. So, for the most part, you’ll skip out on fruits, legumes (like beans and lentils), most dairy, starchy vegetables, and whole grains.

And while you don’t need fruit or beans alone to be healthy, when removed altogether and while eliminating multiple foods, you can wind up with a less-than-nutritious diet.

On Keto? Know the Nutritional Risks

Because of keto’s restrictions, people on the diet are often at risk of deficiencies in essential nutrients, such as B vitamins, vitamin D, calcium, selenium, magnesium, and vitamin C, says Dana Elia, RDN, an integrative and functional medicine dietitian with a private health and wellness practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

If you’re consuming a typical American diet, which tends to be filled with processed foods, you may be deficient in a slew of important nutrients before you even begin the keto diet. Nutrients that Americans are often deficient in include potassium, calcium, magnesium, and the vitamins C, D, E, and K. To cover your nutrient bases, talk to a registered dietitian who is knowledgeable about keto before starting.

The Foods You Can’t Eat on Keto

Keto isn’t just about avoiding refined grains, junk food, and sugar — a common misconception. Everything except for pure fats (like oil) and meat (chicken, fish, beef) is a source of carbs. And while everyone’s carb allotment is different, restricting carb intake to fewer than 50 grams (g) of net carbs per day is necessary to stay in ketosis, or the state in which you’re burning fat instead of glucose (sugar) for fuel.
The idea of net carbs, which refers to the total amount of carbs minus any fiber or sugar alcohols, is often used by proponents of low-carb diets, but it is not officially recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the American Diabetes Association.

As a result of the keto diet’s strict rules about carbohydrates, some foods that are conventionally thought of as healthy won’t fit into a keto eating plan. Here are 10 foods that most people on keto should avoid.

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