Keto Food Grade: Helping you find the best Keto foods
- 2 Minutes Read
Sue Heikkinen, MS, RDN, CDCES, BC-ADM, ACE-PT - Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist
Need help finding the best Keto foods? MyNetDiary's Keto Food Grade can help you plan and evaluate your Keto diet.
What is the Keto Food Grade, and how can it help me find the best Keto foods?
The Keto Food Grade is a tool to help you choose the best keto foods. While a Keto diet is popular with many for its simplicity, the Keto Food Grade can help refine your choices. The Keto Food Grade is an alternative to our original Food Grade.
The Keto Food Grade assigns foods a letter grade:
A - Best Keto foods
B - Good
C - OK in moderation
D - Avoid on Keto
Here is an example of keto food grade displayed for two food entries:
How we came up with the Keto Food Grade
A team of Registered Dietitians reviewed hundreds of foods in terms of their appropriateness for a Keto diet. The dietitians rated the foods on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the best Keto foods. A mathematical formula was developed based on these food ratings and their nutritional profile. This formula calculates a Keto Food Grade for every food a user enters.
Negative factors: Carbohydrates, trans fat
Positive factors: Dietary fiber, fat (with an emphasis on unsaturated fat), protein
Limitations of the Keto Food Grade
- Foods with similar grades may have important nutrition differences. For example, foods that are mostly fat (oils) rate high, though there are differences in types of fat. We recommend a focus on unsaturated fats and oils (olive oil, nuts, seeds, avocados, etc.) vs. saturated fats (high-fat meats, dairy, coconut oil).
- Focuses on low carbohydrate to help find the best Keto foods, but may poorly rate otherwise healthy foods.
- May not account for other nutrition goals you have. For example, sodium is not a large factor in the Keto Food Grade but might be important to limit for some users.
- The formula is only based on nutrition information available on the Nutrition Facts label.
Tips for using the Keto Food Grade
- Focus on your overall choices. Don't get hung up if you eat a few foods with low ratings.
- Carbohydrates have the largest effect on the food grade. Even though a high carbohydrate food may be healthy by other standards, it will have a low Keto grade due to not fitting in this very low-carbohydrate plan.
- Portions still matter, even for highly rated foods.
Hiding Food Grade
If you want to hide Food Grade from view on food labels and meal reports, then you can do that via Plan / Nutrient Targets for web and Android apps, or via Food Entry Setting in iPhone app (open a meal then tap the 3-dot icon at the top right of the screen, then tap Settings).
Still new to MyNetDiary? Learn more today by downloading the app for FREE.
May 12, 2020
