Is Cheese Keto? What "Is This Food Keto?" Actually Asks
This is one of my earliest KetoDick recordings: a minute and a half filmed in bed in mid-July 2017, about a month after I started keto on 2017-06-13 (video cTGYIFOTPl8), and two weeks before anything went up on YouTube. It was never uploaded there. The question was one I kept seeing in groups: is cheese keto? My answer is still the most useful way I know to handle any "is this food keto?" question.
In this recording
- [0:00] I keep seeing the same questions: is this food keto, what is the ketogenic diet, and isn't it whatever the woman who wrote the book says it is? I said up front that I'm not a medical professional, haven't written a book and don't even have a YouTube channel. Filming myself in bed was as close to fame as I'd got.
- [0:21] My definition: a ketogenic diet is any combination of foods you eat over time that puts you in ketosis and keeps you there. If you're in ketosis regularly, whatever you're eating is a ketogenic diet. Is eating a lot of cheese a good idea? Are people eating too much dairy? I said I didn't know.
- [0:49] Can dairy cause other problems? Sure. But is cheese keto? Yes, because lots of people eat cheese and still stay in ketosis. That doesn't make it a good or smart part of the diet.
- [1:13] So "is it keto?" really means "can I stay in ketosis while eating this?" Cheese is very low in carbohydrate, so yes, it's keto.
Watching this in 2026: two questions, not one
What I like about this clip is that it splits one question into two. "Is cheese keto?" and "is cheese good for me?" sound like the same thing, and in a lot of keto groups they get treated that way. Food gets sorted into keto and not-keto, and then keto quietly turns into "healthy" and not-keto into "bad".
I didn't go along with that in 2017. Keto is a description of a metabolic state. Whether a food fits is a carb question. Whether it's a good idea is a different question with different answers for different people, and I said plainly that I didn't know the answer for dairy.
That isn't a dodge. It keeps you from making a list of rules about purity that has nothing to do with ketosis. If cheese is low in carbs and you still lose weight eating it, it fits. If it gives you stomach trouble, or you find you can eat half a block standing at the fridge, that's a reason to cut back. But the reason is your stomach or your appetite, not the word "keto".
Then vs now: the definition didn't change
I kept saying this for years. Two months later, in my explainer on what keto is, I described the diet by what it does in the body (video s_sNd1v8Low). In my video on weight spikes I said a diet isn't what's in a single food item, a meal or a day (video f9P8BPWHc4U). In my video on banned foods I said the dose makes the poison (video ffwBPoKxlDI).
By New Year's Eve 2019 it was almost word for word. I said I don't do strict, clean or dirty keto: if your body is making and using ketones well, that's a ketogenic diet, whatever is in it. I also said that cutting out soy or dairy can have good reasons, but they're usually tied to weight loss, inflammation or general health, not to ketosis itself (live FPMJ7326). That's the cheese clip, two and a half years on.
What the evidence pages say about the definition
The evidence pages back up the "defined by the state" half of this. The NIH StatPearls chapter on ketogenesis describes ketosis as the liver making acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetone, controlled by insulin and glucagon (StatPearls, Ketogenesis). Nothing in that description is about particular foods. It's about what your metabolism is doing, which is why total carbs are the thing that decides whether a food "is keto".
None of the evidence pages covers dairy or cheese as such, so I can't tell you more than I said in the clip. If dairy is a real concern for you, the guide's food list and the post on whether dairy is keto go further.
Key points
- A ketogenic diet is whatever you eat over time that keeps you in ketosis.
- "Is X keto?" means "can I stay in ketosis while eating X?" For cheese, very low in carbs, the answer is yes.
- "Is it keto?" and "is it good for me?" are separate questions. Don't let one answer the other.
- I said in 2017 that I didn't know whether dairy is a good idea, and I didn't pretend to.
- The same definition runs through my videos from 2017 to the end of 2019.