i’ve been spending the last 36 hours researching raspberries wondering why they don’t kick me out of keto well now i have validation on that so i’m eating raspberries like a madman it’s no secret that berries on keto are much better than things like melons right they’re lower glycemic we do hear often that yeah you can have a small amount of like raspberries or a small amount of blueberries or a small amount of strawberries it’s not going to cause a huge issue and there’s some serious reasons
as to why we know that but raspberries seem to have some attributes in particular that seem to make them ultra keto friendly you see what we have to remember is that with fruit especially it’s not just about how many carbs we’re taking in it’s more about the insulin spike that we get and i’ve talked about this in other artiles the insulin spike is what’s going to halt ketone production not the carbs themselves it’s the reaction that our body has to carbohydrates which is insulin so for example like
having some melon like cantaloupe or honeydew there is very little fiber in it very high sugar content so it spikes your insulin up really high then when you come with berries there’s more fiber in them they’re lower glycemic but what is it about raspberries in particular hey do make sure you hit that red subscribe button and also hit the bell icon then after this artile if you’re doing keto highly recommend you check out thrive market there’s a link down below in the description which is a special access
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because you don’t have to go to the grocery store it’s easy but most of all you get foods you normally wouldn’t be able to get at typical grocery stores so special link down below in the description okay so what the heck about raspberries well it turns out that the journal of agriculture and food chemistry had published something that i never saw before it’s relatively new but it found that the tannins that are in raspberries in particular what kind of gives them that you know when you eat raspberries
how you almost get like a chalky uh kind of like squeaky feeling on your teeth like it’s like it feels like it’s taking the enamel off your teeth a little bit even though it’s not it’s just like that that those are called tannins okay and it turns out that the tannins specifically in raspberries affect the amylase enzyme so when we consume carbohydrates what happens is we have a series of enzymes that break them down break them down into smaller components which therefore can get through the gut and into the bloodstream
and spike our glucose well amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starches okay and in fruit you have some sugars and you have some starches raspberries happen to have a fair bit of starches but it turns out that they have starches but they also contain a component that makes it so we can’t break down the starches so amylase is the enzyme that’s required to break down those starches and it lowers our amylase production so when we eat raspberries the tannins make it so we don’t absorb as much of the
starch from the raspberries and if we do absorb it it’s absorbing very slow triggering a much lower insulin spike so albeit they have a low glycemic index already meaning they’re already a pretty keto approved food if you have it in like a quarter cup or maybe even a half a cup but i personally have pushed the envelope as high as a cup or more and i have barely seen a change in my glucose levels or my ketone levels now that being said there’s bioindividuality at play right our microbiome plays a big role and all
this and that but speaking of microbiome there was a study that was published in the journal nutrients that found that raspberries contain something called anthocyanins anthocyanins are a component that are in blueberries and raspberries that change our gut microbiota and how it breaks down the properties of these starches so what that means is not only are we getting a change in the amylase enzyme like at the enzyme level we’re actually getting a change at the microbiome level too so here’s kind of the stage that it goes
uh saliva breaks it down a little bit breaks down the starches then it goes into the gut amylase breaks them down more then it goes down further and the gut microbiome starts to have an effect and allows us to reap different benefits or not benefits from foods so nothing changes at the saliva level with raspberries but we change at the enzyme level and we change at the bacterial level which again is making sense that’s like why i’m not getting as much of a ketone kick-out response as i normally would but the other thing we have to
remember is fructose okay this is kind of the cardinal rule with fruit you don’t overdo fruit okay because it’s very easy to overdo it and here’s the problem most fruit has a bunch of fructose in it fructose does not go through the normal stages of digestion or or at least the glucose part or the fructose part right it goes straight to the liver and what doesn’t end up getting used or stored by the liver ends up going through de novo lipogenesis and stored as fat so it’s very easy to overeat fruit and
have it store new fat okay that’s a problem but the small amounts of fructose that we consume on keto do not affect insulin because fructose operates independently of insulin so that means it uses a different pathway what that ultimately means is that you can have a little bit of fructose from raspberries and have very little if any insulin spike it’s pretty wild so i recommend you try it out but what are the best times to be having raspberries post-workout’s going to be a great time to have them because
that’s when if you do have a mess up situation from it at least the carbohydrates are going to get stored in a carb back loading fashion where they’re going to store in your glycogen stores after a workout another good time to try it would be in the evening time what you can do is you could have a little bit of heavy whipping cream or something and have a little bit of berries that way you’re kind of enjoying your fruit but you’re having it in the evening time that way if you do get an insulin spike
it’s at least allowing carbohydrates into the brain a little bit more so you’re getting that serotonin that tryptophan effect that’s going to allow you to sleep a little bit more so anyway i’m hot on raspberries and that’s my news and i’m sticking to it for today i’ll see you tomorrow