Imagine that you are on your keto journey! However, you are wondering if you can use your favourite and most refreshing beverage - coffee to help you get through the day. The worst part is that you can't find any credible article regarding it. Well, here's where your misery ends!
The answer is a big yes; you can drink coffee on a keto diet. A cup of coffee barely has any calories and doesn't affect the carbohydrate-protein balance of your keto diet. However, you must ensure that you drink coffee the right way and don’t add ingredients that negatively impact your diet.
Through this article, you will know more about the ins and outs of drinking coffee on a keto diet and the alternatives you can use. If you are a coffee fanatic planning to go on a keto diet – you will find some crucial answers in the coming paragraphs.
Is it Okay to Consume Coffee on a Keto Diet?
Well, yes, the great news is that you can drink coffee on a ketogenic diet! The main reason behind this allowance is that a cup of coffee only has around 5 calories, which is highly insignificant.
Moreover, coffee doesn’t have any sugar or carbohydrates. You can also amp up your coffee game on a ketogenic diet by including high-fat mixers such as coconut oil, butter, whole milk, or heavy cream.
However, it is essential to let go of sugar forms such as honey, agave, white sugar, or even the good old maple syrup in your keto coffee.
What is the Best Kind of Coffee to Drink on a Keto Diet?
Hands down, black or plain coffee is the ideal coffee to power you through the day without affecting ketosis. This type of coffee contains the least calories and provides you with the strongest caffeine hit. All of this without the chance of boosting your blood sugar levels.
So, all in all, you get all the benefits of drinking coffee without any added cream or sugar.
Plus, you can also opt for high-quality instant coffee made from 100% Arabica bean coffee to get the best results. It is not just an easy option, but it also gets your taste buds rolling.
Can you Drink Bulletproof Coffee on a Keto diet?
Bulletproof Coffee or Bullet coffee is a rich coffee drink that contains high amounts of healthy fats. It is also referred to as Butter coffee and is made with pure coffee, grass-fed butter clubbed with an MCT oil or ghee.
Besides, bullet coffee comes with many advantages that you cannot obtain from regular coffee or coffee drinks.
While you can take bulletproof coffee during your ketogenic diet, you must know that it is not the perfect fit for weight loss since it contributes 550 Kcal or so – not a facilitating number when you want to drop those kilos genuinely.
Stuff you Can’t Add to your Coffee
The ketogenic or keto diet consists of low carbohydrates and high fats. It reduces insulin and blood sugar levels and moves the body’s metabolism from carbs to ketones or fats. Ketosis is a metabolic state where the body utilizes fats to create fuel instead of the goof old carbs. Thus, the keto diet reduces your carbs intake and increases protein and fat intake to trigger ketosis.
So this makes it necessary for you to avoid food items with high-value carbohydrates while on the keto diet. This statement leads us to different carb types – sugars.
You must know that a single teaspoon of sugar contains around 4 grams of carbs. If you add 2 tablespoons of sugar to your cup of coffee and have around 2-3 cups of coffee every day, that’s around 24 grams of carbohydrates. This amount is high enough to knock you out of ketosis.
Moreover, adding milk to your coffee can also have adverse effects. Milk contains lactose, which is just another form of sugar. If you add milk to the coffee, it will mix another one or two grams of carbs to your coffee - which is not as bad as adding sugar, but it is still not keto-supporting.
What to Add in Your Coffee Instead of Sugar?
Without sugar in the mix, your morning coffee becomes a healthy keto diet coffee. Moreover, adding whole milk and heavy cream is the trick to ensure the high-fat levels.
There are options available like natural caloric sweeteners and sugar alcohols. Natural sweeteners contain more or less the same amount of carbs as sugar. At the same time, sugar alcohols have fewer carbs than sugar but are still enough to hamper the ketosis process.
While we don't highly recommend it, you are open to using supplements in your coffee to make it as yummy a drink as possible. To that account, we will discuss the two main options in the market– Artificial sweeteners and Novel sweeteners.
Artificial Sweeteners
When sugar is not an option, you might want to jump to artificial sweeteners: a step most people take. This step helps make your coffee sweeter and more drinkable, but it also has worse consequences.
Additionally, some synthetic artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame or sucralose, contain many chemicals that significantly negatively impact the human body. These have 200 times more sweet taste than regular sugar, making them one of the biggest causes of wrecked sugar cravings. It also leads to problems in the digestive system like diarrhea and stomach cramps.
Novel Sweeteners
Novel sweeteners are sweeteners that vary in the sweetness and the caloric content of artificial sweeteners and are made from natural resources. Typical examples are stevia, tagatose, and trehalose.
Besides, there are some excellent options that you can look at to add to your coffee. For instance, we suggest you use liquid stevia in your keto coffee. Many powered stevia products have hidden sugar ingredients like maltodextrin, so the liquid is a better pick.
Monk fruit is another renowned natural sweetener that will help you sweeten that morning coffee without compromising your keto game.
What Else can you Add?
Once sugar is out of the window, you can open up to the diversity of ingredients in the world of coffee. One such constituent is spices, which are the perfect solution to better the coffee taste and provide substantial health benefits.
Some common advantages of spices are reducing blood sugar and lowering your body's inflammation and bloating. You can use Ceylon Cinnamon, a hot and sweet spice that aids insulin sensitivity, the fat burning process in the body, and lower blood sugar levels.
Another great option is to add ground ginger to your coffee to give you immunity and an energy boost throughout the day.
Additionally, there are a wide variety of spices that work well with coffee, like cloves, turmeric, cardamom, and nutmeg. Rest assured, these old spices will stimulate your digestion and metabolism as soon as they are inside your body.
Final Words
Although Ketogenic diets are rather strict diets, we believe including additives in coffee like spices, novel sweeteners like stevia, and monk fruit can go a long way. We hope that the article was able to resolve some of your queries on drinking ketogenic coffee or moulding your coffee while on a keto diet.
So, overall, remember to steer clear of carbohydrate sources like white sugar and milk to continue your ketosis phase, and with that, you will be good to go.
FAQ
Although coffee with the right ingredients is a keto-friendly option, major coffee creamers are not. These coffee creamers have a lot of carbs and sugars.
So, does this mean you have to drink only coffee black? Well, no, because there are many keto-friendly coffee creamers that can be bought or made at home.
A well-made, healthy coffee will never kick you out of ketosis. What matters here is the constituents and ingredients added to the coffee. A low sugar coffee becomes the right mix for a chill keto-diet day.
You can take up 400 milligrams of caffeine daily, which is the safe upper limit. This amount of caffeine is present in 4 cups of brewed coffee.
So, having less than six cups in a day is a healthy deal and can even be beneficial to the body. Moreover, the same amount of caffeine is also found in 10 cans of cola drinks and energy shot drinks.