Low carbohydrate nutrition – Vegetables
The ketogenic diet is based on a process called ketosis. It is a specific biological mechanism, which is characterized by an raised level of ketones in the blood, which occurs due to the conversion of fats into fatty acids and ketones. This occurs when the organism gets only small amounts of carbohydrates over a period of time. When you start with this type of diet, your body goes through several changes. After 24-48 hours since the beginning of this diet, the body starts to use ketones in order to use the energy stored in fat cells more efficiently. In other words, your primary source of energy become fatty acids, instead of glucose. Because of that, during ketosis it is not a problem to eat food with higher amounts of fat, than would otherwise seem reasonable. This way the body is losing weight relatively fast (specifically fat). In addition, the loss of muscle tissue (proteins) is minimal, since the vast majority of food consumed during ketosis, also contains relatively large amounts of proteins that are good for your muscles.
However, on this kind of diet, one shouldn’t forget about vegetables because they are an necessary and important source of vitamins, minerals and fibers. Since it is necessary to keep the amounts of carbohydrates that one consumes as low as possible, only certain kinds of vegetables can be used on a ketogenic type of diet. Lettuce, cucumbers and cabbage are some of the vegetables that can be taken when on a ketogenic diet.
Lettuce has only around 2 grams of carbohydrates per 100 grams, cabbage (per 100 grams) has a bit more, around 5 grams of carbs and cucumbers, similar to lettuce, have also only a small amount of carboydrates – only 3 grams per 100 grams of cucumbers. As we can see, all of the mentioned vegetables can be used with no problems in form of various salads, or in other forms.
There are many recipes for various salads by using some of the mentioned vegetables that can be found online. One should only make sure that nothing that contains too much carbs is added in.
Tags: carb, carbohydrate, diet, ketogenic, ketosis, low, Nutrition, vegetables