USEFUL: The Most Ketogenic Diet Foods.

Although insulin is loosely correlated with the carbohydrate content of a food, low carbohydrate, low fat, high protein foods such as steak, tuna and white fish still require a significant amount of insulin.

This makes sense when you understand that the majority of the amino acids in protein containing foods are glucogenic meaning that they can be converted to glucose if not used for growth and repair (see glucogenic amino acids and ketogenic amino acids). Once the glucogenic amino acids are converted to glucose it can be stored in the liver or spill over into the blood stream and require insulin, just like if it came from a carbohydrate food.

I played with the data and found that protein generates about half as much insulin as carbohydrate on a gram for gram basis. I also found that indigestible fibre does not raise insulin.

I’ll spare you the detail of statistical analysis (it can be found here, if you’re into that sort of thing), however it appears that the insulin load of a food is related to it’s carbohydrate content, minus the indigestible fibre, plus about half the protein. . . .

Using this formula I analysed the 8000 foods in the USDA food database to identify the most ketogenic foods (or the foods that require the least insulin). . . .

The foods with the lowest insulinogenic percentage are fats and oils that don’t contain any carbohydrate or protein such as butter, coconut oil, olive oil, butter, flax seed oil and lard.

If we drop out the foods that are primarily fats and oils and sort by the percentage of insulinogenic calories we end up with this list of decadent, delicious, full fat foods.