Beware of "keto friendly" recipes

If your a Sustainable Nutrition frequent blog reader, you know I am a fan of lower carb diets. They do a lot to help people restabilize their hormones so that you can better tolerate healthy carbs down the road.

BUT as I help people try to navigate making low carb meals I am astounded by some of the recipes I see. I am a HUGE FAN OF FAT, it is delicious and necessary to be a healthy human, but that does not mean that you need 5 types of fat in one meal!

Overeating fat while being on a low carb diet will promote weight gain.

So knowing this I take pause when I see “healthy cauliflower mac and cheese recipe.” Let’s dissect this recipe for a moment. Can you count the number of fat based items in it?

This entire recipes adds up to a grand total of 1552 calories, 1406 of those calories being from fat. And why I think this is outrageous is because you could have had the entire head of cauliflower sautéed in two tablespoon of butter and topped with the 3 tbsp on parmesan cheese for 452 calories. But no one “binges” on a head of cauliflower.

Let's go even further, you could have had the mac and cheese you really wanted and only cooked ½ a cup of pasta for the 1406 calories. So really whats the big difference besides some extra calcium and fiber from the cauliflower?

We all know that you would have eaten that whole Cauliflower Mac and Cheese in one sitting, and who could resist. All that fat makes it highly palatable. But my guess is that you couldn’t eat that whole head of cauliflower, even sautéed in butter, in one sitting.

So my warning to you is to look for the number of fat based items in your “keto-friendly” recipes. If your goal is weight loss or weight maintenance a general good rule of thumb is to not have a meal with more than two types of healthy fats. This is solely because they provide a lot of energy in very small amounts.