In this video, I'm gonna take you through 16 of the best low-carb vegetables.
All the vegetables in this video are so low in carbohydrate that you can pretty much
eat as much as you want even on the most restrictive of low carb diets such as
the ketogenic diet
Hey Carbdodgers! My name is Dr. Dan Maggs, if you're new to my channel then welcome 😊
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Now, all the vegetables in this video contain less than 5 grams of net
carbs per 100 grams of food and net carbs are the digestible bit that our
bodies actually can use for energy. It's a really low amount of carbs which means
you'll more than likely be full before you start to over eat these foods and as
you've probably noticed I'm British, which means we call some of our
vegetables by different names from pretty much most of the rest of the
world. I'll try and use the common international names for these things but
hopefully it should be obvious from the pictures what I'm talking about which
brings me neatly on to Number 1. We call them courgettes you might call them
zucchini. This member of the squash family is particularly low in
carbohydrates and it's really versatile. Compare it to other members of the
squash family such as pumpkins which have 6.5 grams of net carbs
and butternut squash which has 10 whereas courgettes have just 2.1 net
carbs per 100 grams. You can roast them. Fry them. Grill them but they're
perhaps most famous in the low-carb world as an alternative to pasta.
You can use a spiralizer to turn courgettes into spaghetti which we call "courgetti"
but I guess if you call courgette zucchini I guess zoodles works just as well.
You can try this Courgetti Bolognese recipe or if you're feeling a
bit more adventurous then use them as a noodle substitute, in this ramen noodle recipe
Number 2 is aubergine or eggplants. Now these can be cooked in a
variety of ways I love them because they suck up the flavor from everything
around them. My favorite way to cook them is to cut them into thin slices and
use them as a substitute for lasagna sheets. Asparagus, this vegetable has such
incredible flavor especially if you can get it locally produced and in season.
It makes a great low carb side dish steamed, sauteed, barbecued. It makes a
fantastic accompaniment for steak. Then Number 4 is broccoli.
Now this might seem like a pretty boring vegetable especially if it's just boiled or
steamed but there's loads of great where you can cook broccoli that make it loads
more exciting stir-fry it, roast it or even blend it up into a soup and number
5 is mushrooms. Love them or hate them, mushrooms are very low in carbs.
I always try to keep some in the fridge garlic mushrooms are a great tasty side dish
just saute them with some butter and some garlic
I mix mushrooms with some cheese as a stuffing for an omelet or make a lovely
creamy mushroom sauce to go with steak. Number 6 is peppers. Now fun fact
red peppers are just ripe green peppers they go through yellow on the way to get
there and the ripening process means that more sugars will be present in the
flesh of peppers. Green peppers are a really solid low-carb choice at
3 net carbs whereas red and yellow peppers only just make this list at 5 grams
per 100 grams. You can slice them up and eat them raw in salads or fry them
up as part of this awesome Beef Fajita dish. Number 7 is the amazing avocado.
Avocados are one of my low carb superfoods. They're just loaded with
healthy fats and are perfect in salads, blended in smoothies for an extra creamy
texture or squashed up to make guacamole is it guacamole or guacamole ... hmm I don't know
If you've never tried making guacamole at home it's really easy and
it's so much better than the shop-bought stuff. There's a recipe for it as part
of the Beef Fajitas recipe that I mentioned earlier, so make sure you check
that out. And all the recipes, by the way, I'll link down below this video in the
description and before we go any further I want to talk about the elephant in the
room. Not all of these vegetables are technically vegetables. Yeah it's true
some of them are actually technically fruits but we talk about them as
vegetables because they have similar nutritional profiles to vegetables even
though they're not but here's a little challenge for you let me know in the
comments down below which is the items on this list is technically neither a
vegetable nor a fruit. Be a fungi and drop me a message in the comments below ⬇️⬇️⬇️
Number 8 is the humble tomato. Again it's not a vegetable but it is a fruit.
Lots of people seem to get upset about tomatoes on low-carb diets and I'm not
really sure why that is. Yeah there are certain varieties which are a bit
sweeter than others and may have a slightly higher carb count but most are
pretty low in carbs and of course there's hundreds of different ways that
you can use tomatoes such as raw in salads or cooked but beware of sun-dried
tomatoes for the same reason that we avoid dried fruits the sugars that are
there are just so much more concentrated in anything that's been dried.
Number 9 is cabbages. Now cabbages don't have to be boring you know
shredded cabbages can form the basis for coleslaw and work really well as a sort
of noodle substitute for low carb stir fry. These can be seriously tasty.
Number 10 is olives. Love them hate them, they feature in quite a lot of our
recipes over at carbdodging.com but olives are often my go-to snack on the
road because you can usually pick up a small pot in pretty much most
supermarkets very easily. Number 11 is a group which is green leafy
vegetables and by green leafy vegetables I mean things like spinach, bringreens,
kale those kind of things. I'm not going to go into detail in this one because
they're not exactly the most inspiring out of all of these vegetables but they
are super low in carbs and full of important nutrients whether you decide
to cook them or blend them into smoothies. They're always something we
get more of in our diets. Number 12 is lettuce and number 13 is cucumber and
I'm going to talk about these two together again because they're not
overly excited on their own but they form the basis of amazing salads which
you can eat your heart's content on a low-carb diet.
Number 14 is something that I think is frequently overlooked as a great low
carb vegetable it's radishes and this includes the radishes oriental cousin
the daikon radish or mooli. I always used to think of using radishes in
salads and we've used them in this awesome
Salmon Nicoise Salad but they can also be roasted and stir-fried get creative with them.
Number fifteen is green beans which we also used in the salmon nicoise salad.
You can use them in salads stir fries or as a side dish but they also work really
well for meal prep foods because once cooked they can be stored really well in
the fridge for a few days and last but by very means not least, Number 16 is the
cauliflower. Oh cauliflower I can't believe I've left you until number 16.
Now it's fine it's fine I may have saved the best to last. Cauliflower is quite
possibly the king or queen of low carb vegetables. It can be mashed as a potato
substitute blend it with parmesan and use it to top off this amazing
shepherd's pie grate it pulse it up in a blender chop it up finely and use it as
a low carb rice substitute and I just love to chunk it up into florets or
steaks and roast it in the oven with some salt pepper and oil it's such a
quick easy and tasty side dish. You can even make cauliflower into a pizza base
and if cauliflower can be a pizza base then my friends anything is possible!!
So that is the list of my top 16 low carb vegetables and hopefully a bit of
inspiration about how to use those in various recipes and all the recipes that
I've mentioned are linked down below in the description below this video.
Now knowing which foods are lower carb options and which are higher carb
options is half the battle when you're starting out
on a low-carb diet so I've put together this downloadable cheat booklet which
tells you the low carb content of most of the common foods you'll find in the
supermarket's there's a traffic light system to show you which foods are all
good which you need to be careful with the quantity and which you should avoid
altogether in order to be successful on a low-carb diet. You can download it keep
it on your computer or on your phone or even print it out and the link for that
again is in the description below this video.
That's it for today I hope that's
been helpful I release new videos like this every Tuesday so be sure to
subscribe to my channel and click that bell to get notified remember to comment
down below if you managed to spot which of these vegetables isn't actually a
vegetable or a fruit at all oh just hit the like button if you found this video
useful have a great week and I'll see you next Tuesday...