Food Trends: The Keto Diet
What is the Keto Diet?
The Keto diet has grown in popularity in 2022 and has changed the lives of many. The main principle of the diet is to consume low amounts of carbs and high amounts of fat. You must dramatically reduce carbohydrate intake and replace it with fat. This reduction in carbs puts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis. When your body is in ketosis, it can burn fat for energy very efficiently. In addition, it changes fat into ketones in the liver, which provides the brain energy. The Keto diet has helped many people lose weight effectively and in a healthy way.
What Can I Eat?
There are different levels of the Keto diet vary based on how many carbohydrates a person is willing to sacrifice. The standard Keto diet is the strictest, with a ratio of 70% fat, 20% protein, and only 10% carbs. So we know this diet means filling up on protein and fats, but what do those foods actually look like? It’s important to distinguish the critical fats, proteins, and carbohydrates for the Keto diet.
For fats, that doesn’t mean saturated fats from heavily processed foods. These fats come from nutritious foods such as nuts, avocado, olives, and more. The majority of your meals (around 70%) of your meal should consist of these fats. For protein, steak, chicken, fish, eggs, and cheese all follow the diet. These proteins should make up around 20% of your meal. The minimal amount of carbohydrates in your meal should not consist of carbs such as bread. Keto friendly carbohydrates include vegetables and some fruit such as blueberries. In order for the diet to work, it’s critical to avoid foods such as bread, beer, potatoes, rice, sugar, and most fruits. Of course it’s okay to have these foods occasionally, but it is important to remove them from your habitual eating.
The Benefits
The overarching benefit of the Keto diet is that it promotes weight loss. It supports weight loss through boosting one’s metabolism and and reducing one’s appetite. Because Keto-friendly food is very filling, it helps to calm huger stimulating hormones, which reduce a person’s urge to eat. The combination of eating nutritious foods and eating less overall is the key to weight loss.
The Keto diet has been proven to help with acne. Acne has links to blood sugar and can be caused by fluctuating levels of blood sugar. Eating a diet high in processed and refined carbohydrates may alter the balance of gut bacteria and cause blood sugar to rise and fall significantly. Extreme rising and falling levels of gut bacteria have bad effects on the skin. Because the Keto diet significantly reduces carb intake, it can help calm acne in many people.
The Keto diet consists of highly nutritious food that with continuous eating protect brain function, improve heart health, reduce risk for cancer, and potentially reduce seizures. It isn’t for everyone, but it is a viable option for someone who is looking for a healthy and natural way to lose weight.