YouTube Video — Transcript

No carb foods. Foods with zero sugar and zero carbs, is there such a thing? Or should we simply aim for foods that have low carbs?

Well, it all depends on what your goal is, with all of the successes with low carb and keto, people want to learn more about this, but there's so much misinformation, so today we're going to give you the bigger picture, we're going to clear up all those questions for you.

I'm Dr. Ekberg, I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympian, and if you like to truly master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything.

Most of the questions I get are whether you could eat this or eat that depending on what you're doing. And then I looked up a few videos and one of the main videos that I found was a video called no sugar, no carb foods and it had over a million views, but then when I looked through it, it was just riddled with misinformation.

It did mention some good foods like butter and salmon and so forth, but then it went on to say that kale, pecans, watermelon, cauliflower and blackberries had zero sugar and zero carbs. Then it went through the whole video and it finished up saying that as you can see, there are a great range of foods that contain no sugar and no carbs, and obviously that's just plain wrong.

So today we're going to talk about all those things. All the numbers that I'm going to give you are going to be net carbs, meaning that you take the total amount of carbohydrate, you subtract the fiber, so you have the digestible portion of the carbohydrate, how much carbohydrate can the body absorb that can affect blood sugar.

And I'm going to give you all those numbers as a percentage, meaning grams of carbs per 100 grams of the food. And a lot of times it's difficult to find reliable data, I've done my best, and if you find some numbers that are off by a few points or that you think that it should be something different, just let me know and we'll try to straighten that out.

So I'm going to talk about four different categories of foods. So first, we have the true foods that have zero sugar, zero carbs, they are zero calorie foods. Then we're going to talk about foods that have zero carbs or just trace amounts, and then we're going to continue talking about low carb, and then we're going to talk about a category where it's sort of depends on the quantity.

All right, so we're going to straighten that out for you. So the foods with zero calories, zero carbs, these you could do basically unlimited, no matter if you are trying to fast or you are trying to reduce calories, or you're doing intermittent fasting, or you're reducing insulin, or whatever it is, these will basically not affect any of those factors.

If you're strictly fasting, of course, that means that you don't put anything in, a water fast means that you can only drink water, but if you just fasting for insulin purposes, then these would be okay. So these items are water, apple cider vinegar in the water, herb tea, so these are sort of in order of of how safe they are.

An herb tea should be perfectly safe, but some of the fruitier ones, they might have fruit extracts, so they could give you just a few milligrams of something, but you're basically safe. Green tea and black tea and coffee, they're listed in order of increasing amounts of caffeine, and while caffeine doesn't have any calories, depending on the person, if you're very sensitive, that caffeine could trigger a little bit of a stress response, a little bit of an adrenaline effect, make some cortisol, increase blood sugar, and it could affect insulin.

But everyone is different, so if you are worried, then you basically have to start measuring and seeing how you're doing, you measure your glucose, you see if there's any change, then you might have an issue with those. And then last on the list here is stevia, and with that we could put in things like monk fruit extract as well.

Uh, they're basically zero calorie, but because they have a sweet taste, again, depending on the person, you could trigger a cephalic effect, meaning that the brain senses sweetness and it assumes that there's some food coming, so it starts driving up some insulin to deal with the food it's anticipating.

Again, everyone's different, some people are not going to have an issue with that, but if you're worried, measure and see what's happening. Next, we're into the category with zero carbohydrates, and what I mean by that isn't necessarily that there isn't a single molecule of carbohydrate in there, I mean that you would have to consume an awful lot of the thing to get even one gram of sugar.

So for insulin purposes, for fasting purposes, it's negligible. So lemon water, if you squeeze a teaspoon of lemon juice into your water, that goes a pretty long way, you could probably make that teaspoon stretch over a quart or maybe even two and still have that freshness to the water.

So if you squeeze a teaspoon of lemon juice, that's 0.4 grams of carb, okay, it's not going to affect anything. Then you could also infuse your water, you could slice up some cucumber, you don't want to squeeze it, you could slice up some lemon, you could slice up some oranges or some other fruit, and as long as you just leave it sitting in the water to be infused, and then you don't actually eat the fruit or you don't squeeze the fruit, now you're also just going to get fractions of a gram, and it can make that water much more appetizing.

Next on the list are the proteins, the big proteins, meat, fish and chicken, and we're talking about lamb or any sort of of meat, fish or chicken that you can find, they're all going to be roughly the same, they're going to have somewhere around 20% protein and they're going to have zero carbs. Now, if your purpose, if your goal is to reduce insulin resistance, then remember though that proteins can trigger a significant amount of insulin.

So on a ketogenic diet, we recommend very low carb, moderate protein and high fat. Then after the proteins, we have the fats. These are the things that you can eat a lot of calories without getting any carbohydrate. So we have extra virgin olive oil, we have coconut oil, MCT oil, that's very popular, that you can put in your bulletproof coffee if you like that.

Uh, and then some cooking fats, tallow, lard, butter, and ghee, and ghee is clarified butter, that means they've heated it so that they have gotten rid of the water and some of the protein, it's called clarified butter. So some people who are extremely sensitive to dairy could actually tolerate ghee, uh, but not the butter, because the butter has trace amounts of protein in it.

And then last on the list, I put mayo because it's very popular, people are asking about that, and mayo is good if the oil in the mayo is good. So if you make it yourself, you could put avocado oil or walnut oil or something like that in there. If you buy it in the store, they're always going to be various forms, the commercial ones are going to be various forms of soybean oil or canola or something like that.

Uh, there are smaller brands with higher quality that you can look for, but look for the quality of the oil, uh, to determine whether the mayo is good. So if you're fasting, then you're going to have the majority of your intake, of your consumption of the zero calorie, if you are keto, you're going to have the majority of your calories in the zero carb category here.

You can eat a lot of these different foods, they're probably going to be 90, 95% of your calories. So now we're done with the foods that have zero carbs or for all practical purposes, zero carbs. Now we're moving on to the food that have low carb, and this is where again, even though you eat most of your calories here, this is where you're going to still get a lot of bulk.

And we're starting off with some protein foods like eggs and cheese, that some people consider them to have zero carbs, and they sort of do, but eggs have about 1% carbohydrate. So if you eat three eggs, you're probably going to get three to four eggs, you're going to get a couple of grams of carbohydrate. Not a big deal, but we still want to know about it so that we understand these principles.

If you have a really, really tight budget for carbohydrates, like if you're trying to keep them under 10 grams, then every gram matters. Next on the list is avocado, and that's one of those nature's miracles, it's like one of a kind. It is technically a fruit, but it's considered a vegetable because it's not sweet.

It is the only plant that is not a seed that is extremely high in fat. So it has about 15% fat and about 2% carbohydrate, you could eat a lot of avocado and not rack up a substantial amount. So there, this is for for vegan keto people, that's the go-to food, uh, and of course for for omnivores who eat a little bit of everything, there's a chance to get some plant food in that is very low in carb and very high in fat, plus it's delicious and it goes with everything.

Then we have three of my favorite nuts, macadamia nut, pecan nuts and walnuts. And these are the ones that I like the most because they are the lowest in carbohydrate, macadamias have five grams, pecans have four grams, walnuts has about three grams. But the fat is also the highest in the macadamia and the pecan and not quite so much in the walnut.

These are nuts that taste really good raw. There's not many nuts that most nuts are are quite bitter until you roast them, but then you you change, you oxidize, you destroy the fatty acids in the nuts. So if you can eat nuts raw, that's where you have the most nutrition and that's where the fats in the nuts are the most beneficial.

So macadamia, pecan and walnuts, those taste very good by themselves, they're very low in carb and very high in fat, they also have very good fiber and protein in them. Something to keep in mind about nuts though, is that they have not such a great ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s. The fat in grass-fed meat is about a one to one on omega-6 to omega-3.

Fish is famous for its very, very high omega-3, it's a beneficial ratio of omega-6 and omega-3. Most of the other fats, vegetable fats, are going to have a little bit more omega-6s than omega-3s in general, but the saturated fats, the and especially the animal fats, the tallow, the lard and the butter, if the animal was healthy, if it was grass-fed, then you're going to have about a one to one ratio there, which is considered quite beneficial because our diets in general are way too high in omega-6s, and the average American sometimes has as much as a 20 to one ratio, 20 times more omega-6s, and that's mostly because they consume so much of the commercial oils made from seeds and nuts.

But that also means that nuts have a lot more omega-6s than omega-3s, so that's a reason that while we can have some of these nuts, you don't want to overdo it because you'll start shifting that ratio, and that's another reason why it is healthier in the long run, you're going to get a a better ratio by focusing more on the saturated animal fats. After the nuts, we have the seeds.

Flax, chia, hemp and pumpkin, these are the ones with the highest fat to carbohydrate ratio. So flax only has two grams of carbs, chia has four, hemp has three and pumpkin has five, so these are are good foods. The pumpkin typically is a good snacking food.

Flax, chia and hemp, you wouldn't necessarily snack on it, but they're good for things like smoothies, and you can grind it and put on cereal and so forth. Again, because it's a plant food, you don't want to overdo it because it tends to have more omega-6s than omega-3s, so you don't want to skew that ratio too much. And a lot of people have also asked about the estrogenic effects that there are phytoestrogens in in these seeds, especially flax.

But again, don't look at a food and say, oh, look, that has the lowest carbs, I'm going to eat nothing but that food. That's why I'm giving you a whole lot of different options here because we want to vary our food intake, we want to choose from a wide variety of foods. So does it have some phytoestrogens, sure.

Should you eat a cup a day? Probably not, but if you grind up and you have a couple of tablespoons, then it is very unlikely that's going to upset any sort of balance. Next in the low carb group, we have the leafy greens, and now they're things like Swiss chard with two grams of carbs, kale with five grams of carbs, lettuce two grams of carb, spinach two grams of carbs.

So these you can eat pretty freely, because even though they have a few grams of carb in them, you're not going to consume hundreds of grams. One of these big tubs of of lettuce that you get, uh, might have 400, like a pound, 450 grams, so that might be nine grams of carbs in the entire tub, and you're probably not going to finish that tub in less than five or six salads.

And when I say lettuce, we're including a bunch of different lettuce, all sorts of leafy greens called lettuce, like Boston lettuce, arugula, romaine lettuce, green leaf, red leaf, etc. They're going to differ a little tiny little bit, some are going to be one and a half, some are going to be two and a half, but they're very low carb, so feel free to eat plenty of those.

There are so many low carb good foods that we continue with the second column here, so olives is also a plant food. So I guess I have to say that there's two foods, avocado and olives, and I'm sure there's some more uh exceptions, but they're both very high in fat and very low in carbohydrate. So olives have three grams of carbs and it's very high in fat, that's why they make olive oil from it.

And then we'll finish up the low carb category with a whole group, a whole bunch of non-starchy vegetables. So non-starchy also means that they're very watery, they're very high in water content. Most of these are about 90% water, so you you notice if you cook them that there's a lot of water left over typically.

We have spaghetti squash with five grams of carbs. A lot of pasta lovers are noticing that you can actually, if you drown that thing in spaghetti sauce and you prep it with some butter and some good spices, then it can be an incredible meal. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, bell pepper, all very low carb, broccoli about four grams, Swiss Brussels sprouts about five grams, and bell pepper about three for the green and about four grams for the yellow and the red.

Cabbage, a great food, and if you turn it into sauerkraut, then it becomes even less, plus when you ferment it, you create a probiotic. So that's one of the easiest things to ferment, and I highly recommend that you give that a try, I do that here at home. So when you ferment something, you're taking natural bacteria and you're letting the bacteria consume some of the carbohydrate in the food, and then they proliferate, so now you have more bacteria and less carbohydrates.

So that's one of the wonders of nature of how it can work a double benefit, and it's the same thing with yogurt, of course. Cauliflower, celery, cucumber, eggplant, they're all about two to three grams of carbs, mushroom, okra, zucchini, tomato, all great foods, very, very low carbs.

And in the meat category, in the red category here, you're going to eat to get your calories, and then in the low carb category, you're going to eat to get some bulk, to get some fiber, to get some phytonutrients, to get some minerals.

You combine these two, but you're not going to be able to live off of this typically because you're going to have to eat like 10 pounds worth of food, so you need to get some bulk here and to get some calories over here.

Next, we're getting into a category where I want to talk about and and try to use some common sense about these things. So in this category, there's going to be foods with varying amounts of carbohydrates, so it's going to depend on how much of it you eat, that's it's quantity dependent.

Some wise person said long ago that quantity makes the poison, that some things are poisonous like arsenic and plutonium in in any microscopic amount, but when it comes to food, there's nothing really poisonous, it's it's all dependent on the dose, and it depends on what your goals are.

I'm going to answer a question where there's been a lot of confusion, like if you're fasting, what can you add to your coffee? And I've heard so many different versions of this that, oh, you can't put milk because it has sugar, you should put cream, it has no sugar, and coconut cream has sugar, don't use that, and so forth.

So here's the truth of the matter. Uh, coconut cream, heavy cream, half and half and milk, they all have sugar, but the more fat they have, the less sugar, because the sugar is basically floating around in the water, the sugar is water soluble. So as you turn milk into cream, as you remove the water and you concentrate the fat, then you're also reducing the sugar percentage.

So that's the one thing. So coconut cream has about 2.7 grams of carbohydrate per 100, 2.7%. Cream has 2.8, half and half has 4.3, and milk has 5.3. So they all have sugar, but if you're looking at the dairy portion, if you're looking at the cream, half and half and milk, why would you want to use cream other than the fact that it has about half as much sugar as the milk, because it's so much richer.

And the fat is not going to trigger any insulin. So if you have a big pot of coffee, which is going to make it creamier, a tablespoon of milk or a tablespoon of cream, the cream is going to smooth it out so much more so that you can get away with a tablespoon or maybe two of cream, whereas you'd be tempted maybe to use half a cup of milk, and now that the carbs really, really add up.

So all of them have carbohydrates, but the best two to go for is coconut cream and heavy cream. So I would go for heavy cream every time, unless you're trying to avoid dairy, and then I would strongly suggest the coconut cream as an alternative. That's what I use for the most part in my coffee.

I put, I do a few shots of uh decaf espresso, I put some coconut cream in it, I put a stevia sweetener or a chicory root sweetener, I put a little butter and I put some MCT oil in there, and then I'm set all morning. Tastes delicious too. What about condiments? Can you have condiments? Can you put stuff on your burger besides a little mayo?

Well, mustard has 2% sugar, and ketchup has 25, and I didn't put relish on here, but it's also way, way, way up there. I didn't put this on the list, but you could use dill pickle, unsweetened dill pickles would be great too. So mustard, you could use a couple of tablespoons and you're not going to get even a gram.

Can you use ketchup? Well, it sort of depends on your carb budget, what are you trying to stay under? And how much ketchup are you going to use? If you're just going to use a tablespoon, now you're talking about maybe two, three grams of sugar.