Your Guide to Keto Wine

It’s understandable to have the need to be fit while still enjoying life; it’s what makes you “human.” Because of this, you’re probably wondering if you can drink wine while on a keto diet.

You can heave a sigh of relief because you can drink wine while ketoing. This article will inform you about how alcohol affects ketosis, keto-friendly wines, as well as how to identify them.

What’s the Keto Diet?

The keto diet, simply known as “keto,” is a diet that’s dependent on high-fat, moderate protein, and low (very minimal) carbohydrate.

The keto diet helps the body transition to a metabolic state where the unavailability of glucose (sugar) allows your body to burn fat into energy. The unavailability or insufficiency of glucose is due to the low carb diet. Since glucose is not available to be burnt into energy, the body burns the fat as energy instead.

Due to the increased burning of fat and the reduction of the sugar level, the keto diet helps one stay healthy and fit. The keto diet works great for most people, but it’s highly favored by individuals who are trying to lose weight. People on the ketogenic diet are at a lower risk of sugar and fat-based diseases and conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, and high blood pressure, to name a few.

Alcohol and Keto Diet

Alcohol impacts ketosis because alcohol contains carbs; the body stores up carbohydrate as glucose. If you continue taking alcohol before you began ketosis, your body will not burn the fats as energy. The reason is that your body will continue to burn sugar (glucose) since its readily available, which is what ketosis is trying to do away with.

Moreover, it’s no longer news that excessive intake of alcohol causes weight gain (alcohol makes you overeat and overdrink). Fortunately, you can drink alcohol while ketoing, but your alcohol intake has to be absolutely minimal.

You also need to understand that when your body transitions to the ketoing metabolic state, your alcohol tolerance level will reduce. This is because your body will no longer readily accommodate a high amount of carbs. Since only a minimal amount of carb is present in your body, the effect of carbohydrate will hit you faster and harder. In fact, alcoholic drinks with higher sugar content will give you a terrible hangover.

This effect is a good thing, though, because knowing the impact of alcohol on your ketogenic body, you would try and stay away from it or only take little amounts. Your safest bet for alcohol while on ketosis are drinks like vodka, tequila, and keto friendly wine. Beers are typically higher on the carbs spectrum than most of the other alcohols, so it’s best to avoid them.

If you’re using your keto diet to treat liver and kidney-related diseases or health conditions, it would be best if you stop alcohol altogether. This is because the impact of alcohol is stronger on the liver and kidney of ketoing people. The higher impact is due to the little or no presence of carbs in the body.

Keto-friendly Wine and Keeping the Keto Fire Burning

Just like you can take a minimal quantity of alcohol on ketosis, you can certainly drink wine, but not all types of wine. Most wines are high in sugar, and your ketogenic diet would scream if you take such high quantities of sugar into your body. Thankfully, there are keto-friendly wines.

Keto-friendly wines are wines that have little or no carb/residual sugar. Additionally, keto diet wines also have low alcohol (13.5% or less) quantity. Most times, when you speak of keto-friendly wines, people think straight to “dry wine,” which is spot on.

Dry wine are wines that were left with little or no residual sugar after fermentation (dry wines do not taste sweet). You can also check out biodynamic wines, which are usually low in sugar and don’t contain synthetic ingredients as well.

You can’t use the color of the wine to judge its sugar quantity. This is because all types of wine, regardless of the color, can be sweet or dry contrary to the popular notion that red wines are particularly high on sugar.

Although the wine type could be an indicator of its sugar content, various winemakers use different methods for fermenting their wines, depending on the method used, this can leave a varying quantity of sugar residual in the wine.

In addition, some winemakers add sugar and other sweeteners to their wine. That said, some white wines taste far sweeter than some red wines. How then would you know the dry wine (keto wine) apart from other wines?

How to Choose the Best Keto Wine

As mentioned, dry wines should be your go-to since they’re the most keto-friendly choice you have.

When trying to choose keto-friendly wines, go for wines that include information about their sugar content (anywhere between 0-10 grams is okay). Look for phrases like “dry wine,” “brut,” “extra brut,” “brut nature,” “ultra brut,” or “zero brut” on the wine bottle labels. They might not be 100% dry, but at least, they’re preferable to wines with high sugar content.

Also, try to avoid cheap/low-quality wines because their manufacturers tend to add sugar and other sweeteners (in large quantities) to their wines because of their low quality. Another thing you can look out for is the “no sugar added” phrase on wine bottle labels. Trusted brands would be truthful about whether they added sugar to their wine or not.

While you try to find your way around the best low carb wines, the following are some low carbs wine you can go for:

• Sauvignon Blanc
• Chardonnay
• Cabernet Sauvignon
• Pinot Noir
• Pinot Grigio
• Pinot Blanc
• Merlot

Conclusion

You can see that it’s possible to enjoy wine even while on ketosis, the key factor therein is moderation. If you’re keen on achieving body fitness results with your ketogenic diet, you need to limit your consumption of wine and related drinks.

Even though you can drink wine while on ketosis, you should go for keto-friendly wines. That’s the only way your keto diet will achieve health, fitness, and wellness goals.