Are Cherries Keto Friendly?

The Ketogenic diet can be difficult to plan around, especially if you’re a beginner to these kinds of specialized meal plans. Keto works through a combination of high-fat and low-carb nutrition. People who participate in keto need to get roughly 70 percent of their daily calories from fat, which forces the body into ketosis to burn excess body fat. This leaves 20 percent of the daily intake to come from protein and the remaining 10 percent to come from carbs.

It can be a tough puzzle to work through at first. An average Keto dietitian recommends eating no more than 30 grams of carbohydrates a day. This seems doable, but a medium apple has 22 grams of carbohydrates. So based on that logic, even the healthiest foods can come under scrutiny. Those cherries glistening in the grocery aisle may look good, but are cherries keto friendly?

When you’re deciding whether cherries are keto friendly, you must consider that the natural sugars in most fruits will mean that they’re bound to have some amount of carbohydrates. This makes it harder to eat a large portion of fruits and stay in ketosis. It’s typically recommended that people who follow the ketogenic diet stick to vegetables, many of which contain the same volume of nutrients as fruit without the sugar.

But if you want to enjoy cherries in the height of their freshness, it’s still possible to do so while on the keto diet. A half cup of cherries contains a manageable eight grams of carbs. With that, you can take advantage of the benefits of cherries, whether you want some extra melatonin before you want to sleep or to reduce muscle strain after a workout.

You can eat them raw, dried, or frozen on a hot day. There are also a variety of low carb and keto-friendly recipes online that you can use to incorporate those sweet cherries into your day. Chukar Cherries’ no sugar added dried cherries are a good place to start since we offer both tart and sweet cherries without sugar or preservatives.

So are cherries keto friendly? No, not really. But you can still enjoy them in moderation.

Source: Ketogenic