Most diet trends swap fat for lean protein, but a ketogenic diet calls for just the opposite. As a high-fat, low-carb, and moderate-protein way of eating, keto meats are the fattiest cuts of beef, pork, lamb, and fish. This keto-friendly meats list will help you boost your culinary variety while keeping your fat-to-protein intake in the ideal ratio.
Let’s explore this extensive list of the best keto meats from each animal source.
Meat plays a starring role in most versions of the keto diet, and for good reason. Keto activates a metabolic state that humans first evolved on a diet of mostly meat for nearly 2 million years.
Our bodies are primed to thrive on meat. For hunter gatherers of millennia past, wasting energy on low-calorie plant foods was simply not worth the effort.
Keto friendly meats are loaded with nourishing saturated fats and monounsaturated fats. And choosing the fattiest cuts of meat will provide your body with the near-perfect ratio for the ketogenic diet.
A good rule of thumb is to look for keto meat that fits within these basic keto macronutrient ranges:
These top five keto meats represent a combination robust fat and accessibility. We selected one option from the five main keto meat categories: Beef, pork, lamb, organ meats, and poultry. This chart shows some of the fattiest cuts of meat:
Beef is a nutrient powerhouse providing copious amounts of essential B vitamins, along with meat-specific compounds like carnitine, taurine, and carnosine that provide anti-aging, anti-cancer, and vitality-boosting benefits.
When selecting your keto beef, look for pasture-raised, grass-fed, and regenerative farmed meat when available. Grass-fed beef offers a better fatty-acid composition with less inflammatory PUFAs. However, grass-fed and regenerative beef can be expensive and hard to find. Conventional beef is also highly nutritious and in some cases, even more flavorful thanks to its higher fat content.
Pro-tip: each of the cuts listed below can be even fattier if you ask your butcher not to trim the fat and look for the most marbled pieces. All data is based on cuts that have had fat trimmed to the standard 1/8 inch, which is just wasteful.
Nutrition Info per 100g
Let’s take a look at the nutrient profile of one of the tastiest cuts of beef: rib eye
In addition to their robust offering of fat and proteins, keto beef provides numerous compounds that have powerful health benefits. These include:
On the ketogenic diet bacon gets all the glory, but there are actually fattier options for pork on keto like pork belly and ribs.
Keto pork is loaded with healthy fats and proteins. And though it’s less nutrient-dense than beef, pork still offers robust amounts of energizing B vitamins, along with rare micronutrients like choline and selenium.
One thing to keep in mind when choosing your keto pork is that unlike ruminant animals (beef, bison, lamb), pigs can’t transform the inflammatory omega-6 fats in their feed into anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats.
Though fat is king on keto, there is more to macros when it comes to getting the most nutritious keto pork: Look for pasture-raised pork from animals that have soaked up the sunshine. This keto meat provides an excellent source of vitamin D. For instance studies reveal that pastured lard can provide nearly as much D as that dietary stalwart cod liver oil.
Consider swapping cured bacon for this fresh cut of keto pork.
Choline might not be on your micronutrient radar, but it should be. It plays an important role in balancing your nervous system, regulating mood, boosting memory, and is key to the formation of cell membranes. 5 This under-the-radar nutrient provides more powerful antioxidant effects than Vitamin E! 6
Lamb on keto is delicious and succulent. Though leaner than the fattiest cuts of beef and pork, lamb will more than meet your keto nutrient goals with the help of a little added keto fats like ghee, butter, or tallow.
Lamb offers red meat specific nutrients like like taurine and creatine, and a bevy of other beneficial compounds including:
Organ meats are the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet making them true superfoods. And with the rise of nose-to-tail eating, they’re getting easier to source.
Each organ meat is loaded with a specific profile of vitamins, minerals, and rare amino acids (peptides) that offer numerous health benefits. Some are even high in vitamin C, which can be hard to get on a keto and carnivore diet.
One fascinating property of organ meats is that each organ you consume provides specific nutrients to the corresponding organs in your body! For instance, beef brain offers amino acids and peptides that benefit your own brain!
Foods like kale and blueberries get a lot of attention as superfoods. But when you stack them up against beef liver, it makes you wonder why liver doesn’t get more love.
In fact, liver is so high in specific vitamins that it’s better to approach it as a supplement than as an everyday staple. [29]
Both beef liver and chicken liver also provide substantial amounts of CoQ10 -Coenzyme Q
A powerful antioxidant and energy generator with links to the prevention of cancer. [30]
Though liver’s benefits are undeniable, its taste isn’t for everyone. If that sounds like you, beef liver supplements, and a multi-organ supplement can be a powerful diet hack.
Here’s a head-to-head nutrient comparison of liver with other so-called superfoods:
When compared to ruminant meats and pork, poultry is pretty lean and will need to be fattened up with butter, ghee, lard, and tallow.
A helpful tip for choosing the most nourishing poultry on keto is to select cuts with the skin on. There’s also one variety of poultry that is always encouraged: chicken liver.
Below is a list of the fattiest chicken by cut:
And here is a list of some of the fattiest birds:
Here the nutrient profile of one of the most nutrient-dense and accessible varieties of poultry:
As you can see from the keto meats list above, many keto-friendly meats still need a little help when it comes to achieving your macronutrient goals. All you need is a couple of tablespoons of any of these excellent animal fats to put you into the black when it comes to fat intake.
Our human ancestors evolved the ability to go into ketosis thanks to the abundance of meat in their diets. So it makes sense that modern keto dieters feed their bodies the fuel they evolved to thrive on.
Fatty cuts of meat from ruminant animals like beef and lamb, along with pork, chicken, and organ meats can provide your body with all the essential nutrients it needs.
The fattier the cut of meat, the more keto-friendly it is. But you can still enjoy meats that have less than ideal fat content by adding in healthy animal fats like ghee, butter, tallow, and lard.
Enjoy nourishing your body with nature’s most high-octane fuel.
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