Ingredients make grain-based dishes more “keto friendly.”
Kansas City With its limits on carbohydrate consumption, the keto diet doesn’t seem to be very accommodating to the grain-based food industry. However, according to Mintel’s Global New Products Database, the number of new product launches in the baking category that made a keto claim climbed by 212% globally between 2019 and 2020.
The term “keto friendly” is frequently used in marketing for new product introductions in areas like cereal, chips, and bars. Among the components lowering the foods’ carbohydrate content are nut flours and non-caloric sweeteners.
According to Rachel Cheatham, PhD, founder and CEO of Foodscape Group, LLC, a Chicago-based nutrition marketing consultancy, “Keto friendly is really, I believe, just a way of reaching a consumer who is eating maybe a higher fat diet than your average diet and looking to limit carbohydrates and especially looking to limit simple carbohydrates like sugars and even starch.”
According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, anyone following a ketogenic diet should limit their daily intake of carbohydrates to less than 50 grams, which means they won’t have much place for bread, cereal, or grains. Due to a shortage of carbohydrates, the body converts fat into ketones, which take over as the body’s main fuel source and cause weight loss.
According to Technavio, a research firm with an Elmhurst, Illinois, headquarters, the global keto diet industry is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of around 5% between 2020 and 2024, with 33% of the growth coming from Europe. “Ketotarian” meals have been listed as one of the top 10 trends for 2021 by The Kroger Co., based in Cincinnati.
However, there may be fewer people following the ketogenic diet. In the 2021 Food and Health Survey conducted by the International Food Information Council in Washington, D.C., 5% of participants reported having tried the ketogenic diet, a decrease from 8% in 2020. According to Ali Webster, PhD, head of consumer research at IFIC, customers may have been avoiding such a tight diet due to the stress of COVID-19.She said, “The ketogenic diet is notoriously hard to follow, especially in the beginning.”
Customers find it difficult to adhere to the ketogenic diet for more than a few months. stated Dr. Cheatham.”Most individuals begin to desire a greater range of foods,” the expert stated.There are now phrases like “keto friendly,” “keto 2.0,” and “dirty keto” to describe less-restrictivediets, she mentioned. According to Dr. Cheatham, a dirty keto lunch would include salmon, avocado, zucchini, and a half cup of rice. Cyclical keto might entail being on a ketogenic diet three or four days a week.
Allulose with almond flour
According to Dr. Cheatham, 80% of a ketogenic diet may consist of fat.
“Because they have eighteen grams of fat per one-ounce serving, walnuts are a great choice for high-fat diets like the ketogenic diet,” stated Jennifer Williams, marketing director of the California Walnut Board and Commission in Folsom, California. Furthermore, with 2.5 grams per 1 oz, walnuts are the only tree nut that is a great source of ALA omega-3 fatty acids.
Conagra Brands, Inc., based in Chicago, introduced the Duncan Hines brownie mix with walnut fudge that is keto-friendly. Each 70-gram portion, sweetened with stevia and allulose, has 33 grams of carbohydrates.
Products that are keto-friendly frequently include almond flour. Hilo Life is a snack brand owned by PepsiCo, Inc., Purchase, NY. These tortilla-style chips are made with defatted almond flour and have five grams of carbs per 28-gram serving. Almond flour can be found in Special K keto bars made by the Kellogg Company in Battle Creek, Michigan, in addition to almond butter and almonds. A 35-gram serving of the bars has 12 grams of carbs.
You may also like:
Food security in emerging nations: issues and remedies
Are drinks the secret to increasing cannabis use among consumers?
Managing the lack of labour for mushroom picking
Is a ketogenic diet healthy?
The ketogenic diet is nothing new. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that it has been used to treat epilepsy for more than a century. Though research results are limited, recent studies are assessing the keto diet as a treatment for diabetes and obesity. One popular motivation for adopting the ketogenic diet is to lose weight.
“Is it acceptable to lose weight quickly?” stated Julie Miller Jones, PhD, a member of the Grain Foods Foundation’s scientific advisory board and a professor in the department of family, consumer, and nutritional sciences at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn. “I guess, but if we look at effective weight loss, it’s something individuals can do for the rest of their lives.
According to studies, people who follow the ketogenic diet for the first six to nine months may lose weight; however, studies that follow participants for two years or more reveal that those participants gain the weight back because they did not stick to the diet.
Regarding the diet, Dr. Cheatham continued, “You might expect to lose weight.” Perhaps your blood glucose level will go down, but more significantly, your insulin sensitivity will rise.
However, what people leave out of their diet may backfire. According to Dr. Cheatham, the keto diet forbids eating a lot of fruits. Certain vegetables are starchy, but not those like potatoes and squash.
According to Dr. Jones, a ketogenic diet involves avoiding cereal fibers like beta-glucan and resistant starch.”Many legumes are prohibited as well because they contain carbohydrates,” the speaker stated.
The Atkins diet is different from the keto diet in that it allows for up to 80–100 grams of net carbs per day and places more emphasis on protein consumption than fat. Net carbs are defined by the Atkins diet as total carbs less fiber and sugar alcohols (polyols).
Consumers who are looking to reduce weight are often drawn to low-carb diets, according to Glenn Gaesser, PhD, an Arizona State University professor in the College of Health Sciences and a member of the GFF’s scientific advisory board. Weight loss ranked as the primary reason for diet adoption among the IFIC survey participants, accounting for roughly 40% of the responses.
According to Dr. Gaesser, diets that enhance cardiovascular function are not as popular with consumers.
For most people, that will be decades in the future, according to Dr. Gaesser. Nobody bases their current food choices on what they hope to achieve in the next twenty, thirty, or forty years. The effect is immediate.
A study examining the relationship between mortality and carbohydrate consumption was published online in Lancet Public Health on August 16, 2018. 15,428 persons between the ages of 45 and 64 were studied, with a median follow-up of 25 years, by researchers from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. They discovered a U-shaped relationship between mortality and the proportion of calories from carbs ingested. There was a 50% to 55% correlation.
According to Dr. Gaesser, there are meta-analyses on both sides that suggest the keto low-carb diet may have a small benefit as well as those that demonstrate the exact opposite. “Overall, I believe the majority of research suggests that it’s essentially a tie, with calorie restriction being the only effective strategy for weight loss.”
He continued, “Low-carb diets have been popular since Atkins started in the 1970s.”According to Dr. Gaesser, “I think the ketogenic diet is something that is the sexy diet today.”