In everyday conversation, it’s perfectly normal to talk about “fruits and vegetables” as if they were basically interchangeable. But on keto, vegetables are encouraged in small amounts while fruit is generally discouraged. What gives?
Fruit is a great example of a food that’s perfectly healthy in the abstract but not right for keto specifically. The problem with fruit for keto purposes is that it’s just too high in carbs. With the exception of root vegetables like potatoes and carrots, most vegetables are low enough in carbs to fit into a ketogenic diet, but it’s a lot harder to squeeze a lot of apples or pears into a ketogenic carb count.
There’s nothing “wrong” with fruit: it’s a perfectly nutritious type of food. But it just has too many carbs to fit into a keto diet - at least, in most ways.
[As a nit-picky side note, the technical exceptions to this rule are avocados and tomatoes: both are botanically fruit, but nutritionally very different from apples and oranges. Avocados have quite a high carb count, but most of the carbs are from fiber. Tomatoes have about 6 grams of carbs (2 of those being fiber) per 1 cup of cherry tomatoes, so nutritionally they’re much more like vegetables than fruit. For the purposes of talking about “fruit,” we’ll consider avocados and tomatoes to be outside the “fruit” category, even though in the strictest of technical botanical terms, they’re “fruits.”]
Fruit: a Carb-Counting Primer
Take a look at the carb counts of a few common types of fruit:
- Strawberries: 12 grams (3 of which are fiber) per 1 cup
- Honeydew melon: 15 grams (1 of which is fiber) per 1 cup
- Cantaloupe: 13 grams (1 of which is fiber) per 1 cup
- Blackberries: 14 grams (8 of which are fiber) per 1 cup
- Oranges: 18 grams of carbs (3 of which are fiber) per 1 orange
- Blueberries: 21 grams (4 of which are fiber) per 1 cup
- Cherries: 22 grams (3 of which are fiber) per 1 cup
- Grapes: 27 grams of carbs (1 of which is fiber) per 1 cup of grapes
- Bananas: 31 grams of carbs (4 of which are fiber) per 1 banana
- Apples: 31 grams of carbs (5 of which are fiber) per 1 apple
- Pears: 35 grams of carbs (7 of which are fiber) per 1 pear
On keto, most people are trying to stay below 50 grams of carbs per day. That just doesn’t leave room for a lot of snacking on fruit, unless you’re planning to eat one apple as a snack and nothing but meat and fat for the rest of the day - probably inadvisable from a nutritional perspective.
Nutritional Issues with Skipping Fruit
But isn’t it dangerous to skip fruit? Won’t you miss out on a bunch of nutrition?
Not really. Fruit is plenty nutritious, but there’s not really anything there that you can’t get from lower-carb vegetables. Take a look at some key nutrients, with fruit and vegetable sources compared in terms of nutrition per carb:
Vitamin C
Fruit is famous as a source of vitamin C, but if you're carb-counting, vegetables are probably a better bet. If you think about carbs as the "price" that you pay for the nutrition that you get from fruit and vegetables, then vegetables give you more bang for your buck - there's a lot more vitamin C per gram of carbohydrate in vegetables.
| Food | Milligrams of vitamin C | Net carbs (without fiber) | Milligrams of vitamin C per gram of carbohydrate (aka bang for buck) |
| Apples (1 large) | 10 | 26 | 0.4 |
| Bananas (1 large) | 12 | 27 | 0.44 |
| Oranges (1 orange) | 83 | 15 | 5.5 |
| Strawberries (1 cup) | 89 | 9 | 9.9 |
| Cauliflower (1 cup) | 52 | 3 | 17.3 |
| Yellow bell peppers (1 pepper) | 341 | 10 | 34.1 |
| Green bell peppers (1 pepper) | 132 | 5 | 26.4 |
| Frozen broccoli (1 cup cooked) | 74 | 4 | 18.5 |
The fruits have between 0.4 and 10 milligrams of vitamin C per gram of carbohydrate - and that's including two fruits that are notably high in vitamin C. Meanwhile, the vegetables have between 17 and 34 milligrams of vitamin C per gram of carbs, which is a better bargain if your carb budget is keto-level strict.
Antioxidants
Fruit does have a lot of antioxidants, but you know what else has antioxidants?
In fact, spices are some of the most antioxidant-rich foods around, and they have near-zero carbs. You can absolutely get an antioxidant-rich diet without fruit in it.
The Good News: Ways to Keep Enjoying Fruit on Keto
OK, here’s the good news: there are still ways to enjoy fruit flavors on keto. You just have to be a little strategic about it. Consider…
Fruit-infused oils and vinegars. Lemon-infused olive oil is a salad dressing classic, but most fruits don’t really go with the olive taste. Not a problem: just branch out into coconut or avocado oil - if you get refined coconut oil, it doesn’t really have any taste. For vinegar, balsamic vinegar and white wine vinegar both go really well with fruit - the vinegar itself does have some carbs, but a lot less than a big pile of fruit would have. Using infused oils and vinegars lets you add fruit flavor to an entire salad for a manageably low number of added carbs.
Spice blends and extracts. You can buy orange-pepper or lemon-pepper seasoning to get that tasty citrus tang in your savory dishes, or hit up the baking aisle for raspberry extract, strawberry extract, and other flavors. The extracts are particularly good for DIY homemade coffee flavorings: add a little of your favorite and some coconut oil or milk for a high-fat caffeine boost.
Tea. There’s a fruit tea to everyone’s taste: apple cinnamon, rosehip, blueberry, raspberry, lemon-ginger, peach vanilla, pomegranate...some of them have some weird artificial flavors, but a lot of them are perfectly Paleo- and keto-friendly.
It’s not really the same as digging into a big pile of fresh blueberries or an apple picked right off the tree, but it can be fun to experiment with different ways of adding fruit flavor to your meals without all the sugar/carbs.
Fruit and Keto: Not a Great Match
Fruit isn’t a “bad” food from a Paleo perspective, but it’s not a great choice for keto - most fruits just have too many carbs to play nicely with a keto diet. There’s nothing in fruit that you can’t get from vegetables, spices, and other nutrient-dense plant foods, and you won’t be setting yourself up for any nutrient deficiencies by skipping fruit as part of a keto diet.
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