While the ketogenic diet is fairly straightforward, it can be difficult to know what foods, vitamins, and nutrients are best to consume to maintain the state of ketosis.
Going keto means greatly reducing your carbohydrate intake and increasing the number of good fats you eat to maintain ketosis. Ketosis is the metabolic state which will enable your body to burn fat more quickly and more efficiently.
While the basics sound simple, forming your diet involves a lot to consider.
For example, you might find yourself wondering if certain vitamins, minerals, and supplements will improve your ketosis, harm it, or have no effect at all.
Among the most common questions regarding what you can consume on keto is whether or not probiotics should be encouraged on a ketogenic diet.
Probiotics are live bacteria and yeast that are considered good for you. However, when you’re on the keto diet, it’s important to be aware of everything entering your body.
Having to add a new nutrient or element to your diet can be a challenge because it typically means the introduction of new food. This can cause problems for ketosis if you consume the wrong thing.
In this article,
We’re going to dive into the world of probiotics to see how it can affect your body and your diet.
Probiotics 101
Probiotics are traditionally praised, with scientists and dieticians having long encouraged consumers to include them in their diet whenever possible.
For those of you who don’t know much about probiotics, they can be found in your gut and have been linked to dozens of health improvements [1].
The possible benefits of ensuring that your body has enough bacteria include:
- Enhanced immune function [2]
- Better skin
- Improved digestion [3]
- Reduced risk of diseases
- Weightloss [4]
- Reduced cold and flu
- Increased energy
Probiotics also have many other, less specific benefits that are widely known. They help with overall mental and physical health and have even been known to increase and improve brain function.
Overall, probiotics are an important factor in general human health.
Probiotics contain good bacteria for your body, and you can increase the probiotics present in your system by including the following foods into your diet:
- Kefir
- Cultured vegetables
- Kombucha
- Coconut kefir
- Natto
- Yogurt
- Raw cheese
- Gherkin pickles
When identifying foods to consume for probiotics, the key is to keep it healthy.
You shouldn’t sacrifice your health just to increase your probiotics. You also want to be on the lookout for how many types of bacteria the foods you’re eating contain.
To achieve maximum benefits, you’ll want to steer towards foods that have a lot of different types of bacteria. The variety is good for you and will ensure that you are getting the best results that are possible.
Probiotics and Keto
One of the reasons that probiotics are popular for keto dieters is that keto can sometimes kill the bacteria in your gut and cause symptoms like a leaking gut.
Leaky gut is a result of increased permeability in your intestines, which causes your body to allow things in and out of your intestines that shouldn’t be coming in and out.
Taking probiotics in a keto-friendly way can heal or prevent this problem and prevent you from having to deal with sickness and injury as a result of your ketogenic diet.
How to Maintain Ketosis
The benefits of probiotics are undeniable, and they alone won’t hurt your ketogenic diet.
However, it can be tricky to get probiotics while maintaining a keto diet because of the sugary foods that they typically come in.
You can eat healthier foods to get them, but you’ll have to eat a lot more, and that will run up your other nutrition stats to the point that it might harm your diet.
Most specifically,
You need to watch your carbs while consuming foods that are known for probiotic content. Probiotics are good, but you don’t want them interfering with ketosis.
So, play it smart!
One way around this is to use capsules or pills for your probiotic needs instead of relying solely on food.
For some of these supplements, you can simply sprinkle them on your food or just take them as they are in pill form.
This eliminates the hassle of trying to prepare enough keto-friendly food to meet your probiotic needs while also trying to balance the rest of your keto nutrition.
Taking a pill once a day is far easier than trying to find probiotics in foods that are also good for the ketogenic diet.
Summary
The keto community agrees: probiotics are an excellent supplement to your diet so long as you remain mindful and diligent when it comes to the foods you’re eating.
Proper probiotic consumption can result in many positive health effects and prevent negative symptoms in your gut caused by a sustained ketogenic diet.
Though we encourage the consumption of probiotics, we want to reiterate that you should be doing it responsibly. This means not consuming foods that will jeopardize ketosis just to get extra probiotics.
The best way to consume probiotics for someone in ketosis is to buy pills or capsules that allow you to consume it directly. This eliminates the risk for any negative effects on your ketogenic diet due to the unhealthy contents of other foods.
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