Experts picked up keto snacks in Walmart, checked lists of ingredients, and here is their verdict: of more than 50 foods, only 16 are worth buying if you are on a low-carb diet.
Ok, you googled “buy keto snacks at Walmart” and want to know which ones are delicious and most suitable for the keto diet. You’ll get it. But let me ask first: why do you need a snack? Do you really need a snack? Everything depends on these answers. Let’s dive into this topic, and I’ll show you the best snack to buy and what you would prefer to avoid.
Table of content:
- Is snacking good or bad for you?
- What can you snack on when you’re on keto?
- Snacks with keto or low-carb labels
- Snacks in the fridge
- Snacks in grocery aisles
- Keto snacks that I really liked
- Keto Walmart shopping list and ready-to-purchase cart
- Cheese chips you can easily make
I’m a keto coach, and I’ve been following the keto diet for 10 years. I went to Walmart and checked all the aisles to find what I personally would buy if I urgently needed a snack. But let me explain first.
Is snacking good or bad for you?
Many studies suggest that eating frequently is bad for your health and that eating 1-3 meals per day is optimal and often beneficial for health and wellbeing (1, 2).
“A regular meal schedule was absolutely unrealistic for our In the last 100 years, we went from long fasting periods to snacking every few hours. Eating frequency is a habit and social convention, but not a physiological need,” says Julia Bogdanova, nutritionist (NANP) and founder of @Spinach&Buckwheat.
Julia Kiltina, MD, dietitian and general practitioner, agrees that you should avoid snacking if it’s just a habit. “Even the healthiest snack on the planet Earth would be harmful in case of emotional eating,” she says. According to our expert, there are just a few situations when snaking is good for you.
3 reasons to snack
- You aren’t keto adapted yet. At the very beginning of the keto diet, when your body adjusts to the new fuel, you may get hungry more often than usual, and it’s ok to have something in between meals.
- You have a medical condition such as hypothyroidism, gallstone disease, or a removed gall bladder.
- There are objective reasons why you can’t have a full meal; for example, you have a day full of meetings without breaks, or you are traveling.
Summary: In most cases, you don’t need to snack whether you are on the keto diet or not.
What can you snack on when you’re on keto?
Ok, this is the most important question, and this is why my MD experts and I have chosen just 16 snacks at Walmart. Snacks are not something special. In any situation, you need food. Pretty simple, ah?
“If you don’t have time to eat, I would recommend pork rinds – they are a nutritionally dense food, with protein and fat and nothing else. It’s the same story with meat jerky. Cheese is my number three. But personally, I prefer pork rinds,” says Maria Dogonova, MD, endocrinologist.
There is a story that in Scandinavian countries, governments banned the “keto” label on butter, sour cream, bacon, etc. It’s like creating a label for “normal food”. Everybody knows what food is and what a surrogate is.
Summary: In any situation, always look for food. Food is something where you don’t need to look at a list of ingredients, like an egg, meat, or cheese. It’s not totally true. Anyway, look at the list of ingredients. You won’t believe how creative producers can be by adding sugar everywhere.
Snacks with keto or low-carb labels
Let’s start in Walmart’s health section and see if there are any keto snacks for us.
Here you can find butter cups, bars, fat bombs, cookies, gummy candies, etc. from the following brands (more than 30 items in total):
- Equate
- SlimFast
- Atkins
- Kiss My Keto
- Quest
Is this food? Nope. You won’t get good whole animal protein and healthy fats from this stuff. All these snacks are sweet, even though they’re low-carb and with some good sweeteners. A sweet craving might indicate you made some mistakes on keto.
If you want us to find your mistakes,
The second problem with these snacks is that you need to be very advanced in label reading to find a healthy option. Some products contain sucralose (I don’t recommend it to my clients), others – sunflower oil (we avoid vegetable oils on the keto diet). Even sugar and maltodextrin may be in keto bars and cookies.
Summary: There is no food in the health aisle. But some of these products could be eaten as desserts. Leave a comment if you want me to make a post about it.
Snacks in the fridge
I can’t resist sharing. One blogger suggested buying a bag of frozen chopped avocados as a snack. I want to see it! This plot could be even better than an episode of Sex and the City, where Carrie Bradshaw and Burger discuss a man who brings uneatable fruits and veggies to a courtroom.
It’s very reasonable to search for food in the fridge. But not at Walmart. For sure, the choice may be different from store to store, but in general, the situation is very sad for low-carbers.
I’ve found only cheese without sugar. All hams, sausages, and salamis were not suitable for the keto diet.
Snacks in grocery aisles
Holly Guacamole! Finally, some food!
In the jerky section, you can find Tillamook – sugar-free jerky and smoked sausages. And… It tastes so good!
Nuts and nut butter are not the best choices for keto snacks because they are quite high in carbs. I would recommend eating them as a dessert after a full meal. But we haven’t found much at Walmart, so let it be.
Attention: many of the nuts and butters in to-go packs are roasted in some oils we don’t use on the keto diet. I like Wonderful Salted Pistachios (but not salt and pepper, sugar and dextrose detected), Blue Diamond Almond Whole Natural (raw).
I’ve found 2 to-go packs with butter at Walmart and both are not ideal. Split is a pack divided into 2 parts. Of course, you can throw away the jelly. But throw out the food, even carbs? Nah.
MaraNatha and Barney Almond Butter are almond butters with palm oil. Even though palm oil is ok for keto by itself, I still have too many questions. Is it added to butter? Why? Roasted in it? Not the best choice.
Yay! Keto heaven – a shelf with pork rinds and chicken chips. Yes to Mac’s Original Pork Cracklings and Epic Pork Rids and Chips.
All other brands were fired because of sugar, maltodextrin, and glutamate. I love Epic Chips, but I should be honest: it’s for people with good teeth.
Unexpected! Some good options are found in the canned food section. One liiiiiittle inconvenience – it’s hard to eat without a fork. But let’s pretend you always have one with you. In this case, you could have Lindsay Sliced Black Olives or Pearls Olives to go.
StarKist EVOO Wild Tuna (in extra virgin olive oil) is in a sachet bag, so you could try to open it just at the conner and try to squeeze it. I think Sprit and StarKist should make a collaboration – to-go pack almond-tuna. I would buy it. As always, check the list of ingredients: there are many other fish in packets with sugar, maltodextrin, and vegetable oils.
Fork! Guys, I found a fork! Chicken of the Sea makes small plastic containers with forks with tuna inside. And I don’t know how it works, but they add sugar in sachets with salmon, but in cans with tuna – don’t.
It’s time for brave decisions! When we say snack, we usually think about something chewable, but you can drink a snack! A broth or stock. In my experience, cold beef broth is something very special, but chicken broth is good cold and warm. Great Value Chicken Broth and Swanson cooking stock have decent ingredients. Caution: I don’t know whether it’s tasty or not. If you try it, give me feedback.
Keto bread often gets on lists of keto snacks to buy, but, honestly, I don’t believe it’s a good idea. Even if it’s low-carb, it still contains a lot of gluten, and the list of ingredients usually looks like a spell, sometimes a curse. The example that came to mind first was the Oroweat Keto Bread from Walmart.
A decision to buy 100% unsweetened chocolate could also be made when you need to buy a snack that is easy to eat on the go. I found at Walmart Bakers’ Bar (don’t look at the “baking” label, chocolate is always chocolate) and Lindt Excellence 100% Cacao. I love Lily’s Chocolate dearly, and if there was a dark chocolate bar, I would add it to my list. But at my Walmart, it was only milk chocolate.
Summary: It’s not easy, but not impossible, to buy a snack at Walmart. Always check the list of ingredients. Look for the shortest lists with words you don’t need to google.
Keto snacks at Walmart: my choice
- Tillamook Sugar-Free Jerky
- Tillamook Smoked Sausages
- Epic Pork Rids
- Epic Chicken Chips
- Mac’s Original Pork Cracklings
- Chicken of the Sea Tuna Lemon&Thyme
- Chicken of the Sea Tuna Herb&Spices
- StarKist EVOO Wild Tuna
- Lindsay Sliced Black Olives
- Pearls Olives
- Great Value Chicken Broth
- Swanson Cooking Stock
- Bakers’ Baking Bar
- Lindt Excellence 100% Cacao
- Blue Diamond Almond Whole Natural
- Wonderful Salted Pistachios
Remember, manufacturers often change the ingredients. It only takes a second to check if they added sugar to a product.
Easy recipe for a snack to go
Ingredients
- 150 g hard cheese (Cheddar, Gouda or Emmental)
- 10 g butter (for greasing the pan)
Instructions
- Put some baking paper on a baking sheet and grease it with some butter, for example, ghee.
- Bake for 40 minutes at 130–140°C (250–275°F), then remove and cool on a baking sheet.
Nutrition
How to get rid of constant hunger? Try our health coaching. Take a quiz, and you will get a piece of advice for free!
Sources:
1. Meal Frequency and Timing Are Associated with Changes in Body Mass Index in Adventist Health Study 2
2. Differential Effects of One Meal per Day in the Evening on Metabolic Health and Physical Performance in Lean Individuals.
Thanks, very useful!
Great research! Thanks! I love pork rinds, it’s a cheap keto snack and it crunches even better than regular chips