The guide

The best high-satiety foods on low carb and keto

Cutting carbs settles one question and leaves the harder one wide open. Every dish in this guide is keto-legal — and they score from 38 to 89. Here is what decides which end you land on.

Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD · 30 July 2026 · 11 min read

Illustration: AI-generated

If you have cut carbohydrate, you have already done the hard part. Most of the food engineered to be eaten past fullness is built on flour and sugar, and you removed it. Appetite does get easier in ketosis, too — pooled across studies, people in ketosis report less hunger and less desire to eat than they did before, which is the reverse of what normally happens while losing weight.

But that is one question answered, not all of them. “Low carb” is a filter. It tells you what is off the plate. It says nothing about whether what is left will keep you full for what it costs you — and that turns out to vary enormously.

Here is what I mean. Nine dinners from this site, every one of them legal on a strict day. The carbohydrate is held down throughout. Watch what happens to the other number.

Every one of these is low-carb

Carbs

Satiety

Net carbohydrate per serving, beside our satiety score. Nothing here is above 5 grams of carbohydrate — that column barely moves. The scores run from 38 to 89, which means the dish at the bottom returns well over twice the fullness per calorie of the one at the top.

Nothing in that table is a bad dinner and nothing in it broke the rules. The garlic butter salmon is a genuinely good meal. It is also 273 calories a serving against 97 for the stir-fry, and you would need to eat nearly three servings of the stir-fry to match it. That is the entire subject of this article.

Carbohydrate is one axis. Fullness per calorie is a different one, and cutting carbs does not automatically move you along it.

The number, in ten seconds

Every food and recipe on this site carries a satiety score from 0 to 100: how full it keeps you for the calories it brings. High means you can eat a satisfying amount of it without much cost. Low means it is easy to eat past what you meant to.

0100

15Butter 35Avocado 53Egg 100Spinach

Four low-carb foods, so you can find your own kitchen on the scale. A day averaging somewhere in the 50s and 60s is a good day. The top of the scale is a place to visit, not to live.

It is not a health score and not a virtue score. Olive oil scores 18 and is excellent food. The number answers one question: how much fullness does this buy me per calorie? If you want the mechanism, how to feel full on fewer calories has it, and the formula is published in full.

Why two keto dinners differ by fifty points

Three things open the gap, and on a low-carb plate they tend to arrive together.

Fat gets added. Not eaten — added, on top of food that already had some. A tablespoon of butter is 100 calories that change the weight of the meal not at all, and water is one of the three routes the score reads: pooled across 38 trials, cutting the calorie density of a diet had people eating 223 fewer calories a day while eating the same weight of food. Added fat runs that route backwards.

Protein gets diluted. Appetite chases protein and keeps eating until it finds enough — across 38 feeding trials, the lower the share of protein in a diet, the more total energy people ate, and it made no difference whether carbohydrate or fat was doing the diluting. On a normal diet, starch dilutes the protein. On keto, fat does. The mechanism does not care which.

The vegetables go missing. Usually not on purpose. They get crowded out by a plate that is already rich, and with them goes the cheapest fullness available to anyone: asparagus is 20 calories per 100 grams and 1.8 grams of net carbohydrate.

This is not an outside attack on keto

Fifteen years of my working life went into the low-carb world, so read what follows as a note from inside it. And on the biggest point here, the low-carb establishment agrees — it just does not get repeated as loudly as the rest.

Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek, the two physicians who defined the modern ketogenic diet, tell people with weight to lose to “reduce dietary fat intake down to the margin of satiety”, because “if the extra fat that is burned is compensated by an increase in dietary fat, then no body fat loss will occur”. Diet Doctor, the largest low-carb site in the world, puts it flatly: “There is actually no amount of fat you ‘need’ to eat, even on a keto diet” — and for weight loss tells readers to reach for protein and fibrous vegetables first.

What this article adds is a number, so you can see which of your own meals the advice applies to.

Eight ways low-carb eating stops working

Roughly in order of how much they cost. None of them is a moral failure, and none of the foods involved is banned here.

The confusion underneath this one is that fat is filling, and people are not wrong to notice it. Ted Naiman, a primary-care physician who has spent years arguing for protein inside the low-carb world, put the whole problem in one sentence:

Fat is definitely satiating, it's just not high satiety per calorie. So if I eat an entire stick of butter, I have a ridiculous amount of satiety. Like I won't be hungry for the rest of my life, but it's also 3000 calories. So I'm literally getting fatter at the same time.

Disclosure, because it matters here: Naiman helped create the satiety-per-calorie framework this site is built on, and we have worked together. So do not take the point on his authority — take it on Phinney, Volek and Diet Doctor above, none of whom have anything to do with me, and who say the same thing.

The salty, fatty breakfast protein — for a quarter of the calories per 100 g.

The same mince, ten points leaner. Nothing else about the meal changes.

2. Eating too little protein in case it breaks ketosis

The most persistent piece of folklore in this world: that surplus protein turns into glucose and undoes the diet. The measurement does not support it. Give fasted volunteers labeled protein with no carbohydrate — conditions chosen to maximize gluconeogenesis — and of the 50 grams of glucose they made over the next eight hours, under 8% came from the protein they ate.

Nor does high protein empty the ketones out. At 30% of calories from protein with almost no carbohydrate, people reached blood ketones of 1.35 and 1.52 mmol/L in two separate trials — well inside nutritional ketosis — and were markedly less hungry.

What happens: you are hungry in a way the diet was supposed to fix, you lose more muscle than you needed to, and you conclude that keto stopped working.

The fix:use the clinical numbers rather than the folklore. Virta's own guidance is 1.2 g of protein per kg of reference body weight as a floor, 1.5 as the target, 2.0 as a ceiling — worth reading alongside their own admission that no human dose-response study underpins those figures. For most adults it lands somewhere near 100 to 150 grams a day. Almost nobody eating keto is over it.

3. Reading “zero carbs” as “zero cost”

Cheese, cream, nuts and nut butters are the four that do the most damage, precisely because they are unrestricted. There is no counting to stop you, so nothing does. Heavy cream scores 17 and is 343 calories per 100 grams; cream cheese scores 22; macadamia nuts score 20 and a modest handful is over 200 calories.

What happens:a few hundred calories arrive daily without ever being decided on, and they are invisible because nothing on the label objects. Naiman again, on his own kitchen rather than anyone else's: “my number one snack used to be macadamia nuts. I used to buy pounds of macadamia nuts... I had tons of satiety. And the problem was I just literally walked around about ten pounds fatter back when I ate these nuts just as a snack.” The satiety was real. So were the calories.

The fix: treat these as ingredients rather than as foods. Cheese grated over vegetables is doing a job. Cheese eaten by the slice while cooking is not.

Both dairy, both low-carb. One is 408 calories per 100 g, the other 72.

The salty handful, upgraded. Check the marinade — jerky often carries a little sugar.

Forty-two to ninety-two, on the same shelf. The jerky is mostly protein; the cheese crisps are 652 calories per 100 grams of concentrated cheese, which is what a cheese crisp is. And the category's most famous product, MCT oil, scores 18 — 850 calories per 100 grams of pure fat, sold as a weight-loss aid.

Worth knowing how the number on the front is produced, too, because “net carbs” has no legal definition anywhere in US food law. It is arithmetic the manufacturer does: total carbohydrate, minus the fiber, minus the sugar alcohols. Two things are wrong with that. Total carbohydrate was never measured in the first place — the regulation has it “calculated by subtraction of the sum of the crude protein, total fat, moisture, and ash from the total weight of the food”, so it is a leftover. And the sugar alcohols being subtracted are not free: the same regulation makes the manufacturer count maltitol at 2.1 calories a gram in the calorie line, barely half a step below sugar, while nothing stops them subtracting all of it from the carb claim on the front. Erythritol at zero calories a gram is a fair subtraction. Maltitol is not.

None of which makes these products bad. It means the number on the front is a marketing figure and the panel on the back is the fact. Turn it over, read the calories, and treat “1 g net carbs” as a claim rather than a measurement.

7. Not replacing the salt

The one on this list that is not about calories at all. Cutting carbohydrate drops insulin, and the kidneys start dumping sodium and water. The headache, fatigue, light-headedness and cramps of the first two weeks — “keto flu” — are mostly that.

The fix: salt food to taste, add a cup of broth or bouillon daily, and eat vegetables for the potassium. Clinical keto programs aim for roughly 4 to 5 grams of sodium a day during adaptation, which is far more than most people expect.

One important exception. If you have high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney disease, or take a diuretic, do not load sodium on the strength of a general article. That advice is written for people with normal blood pressure and normal kidneys, and for you the calculation is different. Ask whoever prescribes for you.

8. Chasing a bigger ketone number

Higher ketones feel like proof that it is working. They are a measure of how little carbohydrate you ate, not of how much fat you lost. Put seventeen men in a metabolic ward with calories and protein held constant, switch them to ketogenic, and the fuel switch is clear and measurable — but “body fat loss slowed during the KD”.

And the best real-world evidence for keto reversing type 2 diabetes — HbA1c down 1.3 points, 94% of insulin users cutting or stopping — was achieved at a group average blood ketone level of 0.31 mmol/L,below the usual 0.5 threshold for “nutritional ketosis”. Whatever did the work there, it was not a high ketone reading.

The fix: the most common way to raise a ketone number is to eat more fat and less protein, which is the exact trade this article is arguing against. Chase the outcome, not the biomarker.

What to put on the plate

Everything below fits a low-carb day, and most of it fits a strict one. Ranked inside each aisle, so the number reads as mileage rather than as a verdict: this is how far each option takes you.

Protein, and how it was cut

A low-carb plate is already built around protein, so the ranking here is almost entirely a question of how much fat came attached. Seafood does best because it carries the most protein for the fewest calories.

Fattier cuts are not disqualified, they are just more expensive per unit of fullness. Ribeye scores 35 and a trimmed porterhouse scores 80 — same animal, same zero carbohydrate, 254 calories per 100 grams against 145. Sardines, the low-carb darling, land at 67: good food, and still a third below the tinned tuna beside them, because 208 calories per 100 grams is what the oil costs.

The vegetables that barely count

The highest scores on this site live here, and every one of these is under 5 grams of net carbohydrate per 100 grams. A large pile costs almost nothing against a strict daily budget — which makes this the one place you are allowed to stop measuring and just eat.

It is also the part of the plate that protein-first thinking is most often assumed to be against, and is not. Naiman calls protein the most satiating macronutrient by far, and then says the quiet part out loud: “anything that has larger weight and volume for fewer calories is going to have higher satiety per calorie... green things like leafy green vegetables... have a ridiculously high satiety per calorie.”

The trap is what goes on them. Roasted broccoli in a tablespoon of oil roughly doubles the calories of the broccoli; roasted broccoli in three tablespoons is an oil dish with broccoli in it. Roast them on a hot tray with a light brush and finish with lemon, salt and chili instead.

Dairy, strained

The biggest single upgrade available in a low-carb fridge. Straining removes the watery whey, which roughly doubles the protein for the same calories — and takes some of the lactose out with it, so strained dairy is lower in carbohydrate than the milk it came from.

Be honest about the pot on a strict day: a 170 g pot of plain Greek yogurt is about 6 grams of carbohydrate, a real slice of a 20-gram budget. It is also 17 grams of protein for 104 calories, which is the best trade in the fridge. Flavored pots vary enormously — the number on the pot beats any rule. And if you want the same job done for almost no carbohydrate at all, egg white scores 97 and beats every pot above.

And here is the same aisle walked from the wet end to the dry end, which is the clearest picture of what concentration costs:

One shelf, four steps, all of them low in carbohydrate. Take the water out of dairy and what is left is fat — 61 calories per 100 grams becomes 717, and the score falls off a cliff. Nothing here is forbidden. The two on the left are simply the ones that feed you.

The fats, priced

This section exists so nothing above can be read as telling you to eat low-fat. Fat is not the enemy and these are not bad foods. What the numbers do is separate fat that arrives inside a food from fat you add on top — and the gap between an olive and a spoon of oil is most of this article.

Olive oil scoring 18 is not a verdict on olive oil, which is excellent food with genuine evidence behind it. It is a statement that pure fat cannot fill you up per calorie, because there is nothing in it but calories. Use it. Just know what a generous pour costs.

When the plate is missing its starch

The stand-ins that genuinely work do so because they are mostly water and fiber, not because they are clever.

Dinners that hold both lines

Low in carbohydrate and high in satiety per calorie, which the table at the top showed is not automatic. Every one is scored from its ingredients, the same way a food is.

All recipes, scored →

If you take medication, read this first

This is the part of a low-carb article that is usually a single line of small print, and it should not be. Carbohydrate restriction is a potent metabolic intervention. If you are medicated, the dose that was right last week can be wrong this week.

Four situations that need a doctor before you start, not after

SGLT2 inhibitors.Empagliflozin, dapagliflozin, canagliflozin — the “-flozin” drugs. Combined with carbohydrate restriction these can cause ketoacidosis while your blood sugar still reads normal, which is exactly why it gets missed until someone is very unwell.

This is the one item on the page I will not soften. The manufacturer names this diet on the label — among the causes of ketoacidosis it lists being “on a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates (ketogenic diet)” — and the international consensus for type 1 diabetes is blunter still: “SGLT inhibitor therapy should not be used in patients using low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diets.”That consensus is written about type 1; the label applies to everyone taking the drug. Either way this is not a “mention it at your next appointment” item. Talk to whoever prescribes it before you cut carbohydrate, and if you are on one of these and become nauseated, breathless or confused, treat it as an emergency and say that you are eating low-carb — even if your glucose meter looks fine.

Insulin and sulfonylureas (glipizide, glimepiride, gliclazide). These lower blood sugar whether or not you ate carbohydrate, so cutting carbs without cutting the dose risks hypoglycemia within days. In the best trial of keto for type 2 diabetes, 94% of insulin users reduced or stopped their dose — under supervision, with monitoring. That is the result you want, and it is not a thing to attempt alone.

Blood pressure medication. Blood pressure often falls in the first weeks. That is good news that can arrive as dizziness on standing. Doses frequently need reducing.

Type 1 diabetes. Low-carb eating can be done well in type 1, but the margin for error around ketones and insulin is genuinely small. Specialist supervision, not a website.

Also worth a conversation first if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, have kidney or liver disease, a history of pancreatitis or gallstones, or any history of an eating disorder.

What this can't tell you

Read these before you rearrange the fridge

There is a real tension here, and this article does not resolve it. Deep, sustained ketosis is easiest to reach on a lot of fat and modest protein. Maximum satiety per calorie points the other way: more protein, more vegetables, less added fat. If you are low-carb for weight and hunger, the satiety direction is almost certainly right for you. If you are in ketosis for epilepsy or another specific therapeutic reason, your protocol wins and this article does not apply.

The score is per 100 grams. For meals that is roughly the unit you eat, so it works. For calorie-dense things eaten in small amounts — nuts, cheese, oil — check the portion too. Our snacks guide leads with that problem.

Low carb is not required for any of this. When 609 adults were randomized to healthy low-carb or healthy low-fat for a year, with both groups taught to build meals from real food and vegetables, they lost 6.0 kg and 5.3 kg respectively. The label mattered far less than what went on the plate inside it. If low-carb suits you, this article is for making it work better — not an argument that you picked right.

Nothing here is forbidden. Butter scores 15 and butter is fine. Knowing what a food costs you in fullness is information, and information is easier to live with than a rule.

Where to start

One change, not eight. If you only take a single thing from this page, take this: put a large pile of non-starchy vegetables under the protein you were going to eat anyway, and pour half as much fat over the top. The carbohydrate stays where you want it. The rest of the plate starts working for you instead of against you.

The best high-satiety foods Look up a food See how the score works