First of all, let us explain what a ketogenic diet is. The keto diet is a diet based on food that is low in carbs and high in fats. If you want to practice a proper ketogenic diet, you need to replace the carb intake with fat intake. That way, your body will get into a state called ketosis.
What is ketosis? As stated in many keto shakes’ reviews, when your body is in the state of ketosis, you feel less hungry and you lose more fat. Every healthy individual that practices a keto diet can get into this state after consuming less than 50g of carbs (every day) for 2–4 days.
Determine the Purpose for Taking Keto-Friendly Shakes
Overall, we can determine four groups of people who could benefit from these shakes:
- People that want to maintain a healthy diet
- People that want to reduce their weight
- People that want to use meal replacements
- People that want to control the calorie intake
In a more general sense, quite a few meal replacement products contain high amounts of carbs and sugar (like protein bars), unlike keto products that have a low percentage of carbohydrates (5%–10%). Low carb intake equals more energy, faster weight loss, and less food craving.
Consider the Following
To find the best protein shakes for a keto diet, you need to pay attention to the following:
- Carb, protein, and fat percentage
- Number of calories
- Flavors
- Benefits and side effects
- Price
Carb, protein, and fat percentage
As noted above, a good keto diet is based on food that has a small percentage of carbs, a moderate percentage of protein, and a high percentage of fat.
To put it simply, there is a formula you can follow. Each shake should consist of 5%–10% of carbs, 30%–35% of protein, and 55%–60% of fat.
Number of Calories
The number of calories in your keto breakfast smoothie will depend on your personal goals. For example, if you want to replace your meals with these shakes completely, you need to find a drink with enough calories to keep you full.
People are generally advised to consume 2,000–3,000 calories during the day, even though this is not a written rule. Age, gender, and activity levels have a significant impact on one’s recommended calorie intake.
To keep it simple, for a full meal replacement—assuming you eat 4–5 times a day—you’ll need to drink shakes with 400–600 calories per serving.
Variety of Flavors
This point is easy to decipher. If you don’t want your drink to be bland, choose ketogenic meal replacement shakes that come in different flavors. The most popular shake flavors are vanilla and chocolate. That said, you can find many other flavors, like strawberry, coconut, cinnamon, cheesecake, etc.
Benefits vs. Side Effects
Following a ketogenic diet has many health benefits: reducing food craving, losing weight, getting energized, supporting digestion and gut health. That said, as much good as it can bring, it can also harm us if we don’t follow the rules.
The most common side effects of keto-friendly smoothies can include the following: fatigue, nausea, vomiting, headache, exhaustion, shaking, bad breath, etc. This is also called keto flu.
Affordability
When it comes to pricing, pay close attention to the number of servings per container or per bottle. To get the overall cost, you need to divide the final price by the number of servings. For example, if one keto powder costs $40.00, and it contains 14 servings, the cost per serving will be $2.80, and so on.
Take into account that some brands use organic and natural ingredients, which is bound to influence the final price of even the best, most affordable keto shakes.