Key takeaways

  • Raw tomatoes are typically keto-friendly because they contain lower carbohydrate levels than other fruits, such as apples and bananas.
  • You may want to avoid certain tomato-based products with added sugars, such as tomato sauce, salsa, tomato paste, and some canned tomatoes, while on a ketogenic diet.
  • When grocery shopping, it can be helpful to check the labels of tomato-based products to ensure the carbohydrate levels will fit with your diet plan.

The ketogenic diet is a high fat diet that drastically restricts your intake of carbohydrates. To achieve this, the diet requires you to cut out or severely limit your intake of carb-rich foods, including grains, legumes, starchy vegetables, and fruit.

Though tomatoes are commonly considered a vegetable, they’re botanically a fruit, causing some to wonder whether they can be included on a ketogenic diet.

This article discusses how keto-friendly tomatoes truly are.

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are considered a fruit. However, unlike other fruits, they’re keto-friendly.

That’s because tomatoes contain around 4 grams (g) of net carbs per 100 g. This is lower than other fruits, like apples and bananas.

Hence, tomatoes are much easier to fit within the keto diet’s daily carb limit than other fruits. The same can be said of other low carb fruits, including:

In addition to their low carb content, tomatoes are rich in fiber and contain a variety of beneficial plant compounds, which may be lacking on a strict ketogenic diet. These are two more reasons to include them on your keto diet.

How to calculate net carbs

You can calculate net carbs by taking the carb content of a food and deducting its fiber content.

Although raw tomatoes can be keto-friendly, not all tomato products are.

For instance, many store-bought tomato products contain added sugars. This can include:

Added sugars significantly increase a food product’s total carb content, making it more difficult to fit into a ketogenic diet. To avoid tomato-based products containing extra sugar, be sure to check the ingredient label before purchasing.

Sundried tomatoes are another tomato-based food that may be less keto-friendly than raw tomatoes.

Due to their low water content, sundried tomatoes contain around 50 g of net carbs per 100 g, which is significantly more than the same serving of raw tomatoes.

For this reason, you may benefit from limiting how many sundried tomatoes you eat while following a ketogenic diet.

The ketogenic diet puts your body in ketosis, a metabolic state in which your body starts burning fat for energy and producing ketones as a byproduct.

Some healthcare professionals may recommend a ketogenic diet as part of treatment for neurologic conditions such as epilepsy. However, it has also been linked to a range of potential health benefits, including:

  • weight loss
  • improved blood sugar management
  • improved cardiovascular markers

To achieve ketosis, your body needs to switch from using carbs to using fat as its main fuel source. To make this possible, your daily carb intake needs to drop to less than 5% to 10% of your daily calories, typically adding up to less than 50 g of carbs per day.

Depending on the type of ketogenic diet you follow, the reduction in calories is partially offset by an increased intake of calories from fat or fat together with protein.

A ketogenic diet requires you to severely restrict your intake of all carb-rich foods, including fruit.

Though botanically a fruit, raw tomatoes are considered keto-friendly, as they contain significantly fewer carbs than the same quantity of fruit.

The same cannot be said of sundried tomatoes, as well as many other prepackaged tomato-based products, which are often sweetened with sugar.

When in doubt, always check the food label to determine whether a certain food fits in with your keto diet.