If you follow dietary news — or just know anyone in the health and fitness community — there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the ketogenic diet. The keto diet is an exciting, scientific approach to general fitness, and people who have tried it swear by its efficacy as a way of losing weight in a rapid but healthy fashion.
Basically, the keto diet is a way of taking advantage of a basic fact about the human body: while we naturally burn carbohydrates and sugars as a primary energy source, if carbs are cut significantly, the body enters a state called ketosis in which it starts burning fat first. So long as you continue to keep your carb intake below a certain critical threshold (and increase your fat intake to compensate), you can stay in ketosis indefinitely.
This means that people on the keto diet often need to completely change what they are eating on a day-to-day basis. And because the keto diet runs on fat, many keto eaters compensate for their reduced carb intake by eating more fat-heavy meats, like steaks, ground beef, and sausages. This in turn can cause problems if the meat being consumed is low quality.
The Difference Between Clean and Dirty Keto
In the literature about keto, a distinction is often made between “clean” and “dirty” keto. A greasy hamburger with a slice of cheese on top of it is a keto meal, but it may not be particularly healthy in other ways, which is why cleaner ways of doing keto emphasize whole foods, plenty of vegetables, and sustainable meats.
Clean keto eaters tend to have more success in the long run, because dirty keto simply does not provide as much in the way of essential nutrients and vitamins. If you are considering giving the keto diet a try, therefore, you have to think about more than just the macronutrients: you also need to make sure you are eating balanced, healthy meals.
The Importance of Good Meat for Clean Keto
While the Keto diet emphasizes fat, protein also plays a major role, especially in controlling appetite and cravings. Because protein rich foods like beans and lentils also have a lot of carbs, most keto eaters will turn to meat to provide this macronutrient.
Good quality meats like grass fed steak are essential for clean keto, because they supply an abundance of iron, omega-3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid and vitamin E. And because most farms that produce grass fed cattle have also embraced sustainable farming methods that produce healthier meat with a smaller carbon footprint, they provide nutrition that is cleaner for you and better for the world.
Fortunately, with the keto convenience of mail order steak it is easy to get high quality meat delivered straight to your door, which means that augmenting this aspect of your keto diet doesn’t have to come at the cost of time and energy spent shopping at specialty butcher shops.
As anyone who has tried it will tell you, the keto diet is an exciting adventure that can yield truly surprising results. But if you are thinking about going keto in 2019, make sure to do it in a clean way by emphasizing high quality local meats that will provide your body with the fuel it needs.