FAQ’s

One serving of the Keto Chow dry powder and contains less than 1g of fat and 26g of protein, and can therefore be used in conjunction with a Protein-Sparing Modified Fast. However, be aware that omitting fat will prevent the absorption of certain vitamins (A, D, K), and your Keto Chow will not be as filling.

We recommend mixing your Keto Chow with 10g of fat minimum to gain the full nutritional benefit of Keto Chow. Check out our walkthrough on using the Calorie Calculator to customize Keto Chow to fit your specific requirements.

Keto Chow is an ultra-low-carb meal replacement shake mix, to help you maintain nutritional ketosis. Combine it with a fat source of your choice (heavy cream, butter, oil) and water. One shake provides a third of your daily vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, electrolytes and more. It creates a meal replacement that is nutritionally complete.

People usually compare it to a “melted milkshake” though you can go full-on “frosty” by blending with ice or mixing in an ice cream maker.

Whipping cream can work, it just has a lower fat content. Lower fat content means more lactose (sugar) which will make ketosis more difficult. Half-and-half has an even lower fat content and really a lot of sugar that will likely guarantee you won’t achieve ketosis.

Here are the calories and carbohydrate content for a 15ml/1 tablespoon “serving”:

Interestingly enough, all of the creams have less than 1g of carbs per “serving” so the package will say “0g total carbs” – even though the half-and-half has nearly 4x as many carbs per calorie compared to heavy cream. You have to muck around the USDA food database to get accurate nutrition information.

You CAN do it with just water or almond milk if you have a specific reason for doing that AND you are aware that not using fat will prevent the absorption of certain vitamins (A, D, K) and your Keto Chow will not be as filling, meaning it will just be a snack and not a meal. We generally only recommend doing this if you are doing something specific like a Protein Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF) and only for a short period of time. What we are trying to avoid is people not using fat because they still have the mentality that fat is bad and needs to be avoided. However, it’s not a good idea if you’re trying to do keto. Keto is a high-fat, moderate-protein, and low-carb nutrition plan. It is not low-fat, low-carb.

On keto, you need calories. We don’t recommend having more than a 15% calorie deficit while using Keto Chow. Water, almond milk, and other low-fat/low-calorie items won’t provide sufficient calories. Keto is all about living off fat.

Embrace the fat. Use heavy cream or avocado oil in your Keto Chow and put butter on your steak.

We have a short video that explains what fats you can use.

I actually did a 100-day experiment where I didn’t eat anything BUT Keto Chow and different kinds of fats. The short version is: I like to use butter the best, then heavy cream. You can also use avocado oil, a little MCT oil, even coconut oil if you mix it the same as butter.

So, based on all that, it’s entirely up to you!

It’s a bit of an involved subject, but here’s the short version.

We don’t recommend having a caloric deficit higher than 15% off your BMR. For example, if you need 1875 calories a day, you need at least 85% of that from food (1593 calories). If you go lower than that, you risk crashing your metabolism and going into starvation mode. This will stall ketosis, and it’s subsequent fat. Our bodies are smart and know to reduce output when faced with too large of a deficit.

If you dive deeper into the science of it, you’ll also run into issues of high fasting insulin that keeps fat cells from releasing energy, even with low glucose levels. Thus you end up with no glucose, no fat, and no ketones to run your cells and everything slows down.

Some simple math will solve this dilemma. Take your daily calorie target and divide it by two. You can then use our How To Chow graphic. This will help you determine how much fat you need for half of your daily calories in one shake.

If you are mixing up Keto Chow with cold water:

In order to get the best TASTE, we recommend you allow your Keto Chow shake to refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, or preferably overnight. Allowing it to sit removes a harsh vitamin/metallic taste (30-45 minutes), and eliminates a lot of the saltiness (2-3 hours). As a result, you improve taste and texture.

Drinking immediately after mixing doesn’t hurt you, or cause you to lose health benefits.

If you are mixing up Keto Chow with warm or hot water:

In this case, all of the stuff is immediately dissolved, you CAN refrigerate it and reheat it later, or just drink it right away.

Starting with version 2.5.2 of Keto Chow (full changelog here), we switched to using Redmond Real Salt in Keto Chow.

• Real Salt tastes better than typical table salt.
• Real Salt is mined in Utah, just a few hours away from Keto Chow HQ.
• Real Salt has a lot of cool trace minerals that add to the flavor.
• …but Real Salt has a lot of cool trace minerals. Some of that shows up like sand at the bottom of your container.

So, lots of pros, with that one con. Most people will notice the bit of reddish “sand” at the bottom of the bottle and it’s not a big deal, but if you have a thicker viscosity (either you use less water, use heavy cream instead of butter, or you thicken the shake using a bit of gelatin/guar gum/xanthan gum) or take a drink IMMEDIATELY after shaking up your Keto Chow, you may get some of those un-dissolved minerals in your mouth. It’s harmless (actually it has some added iron and some manganese which your stomach acid will dissolve) but can be annoying to some people.

To mitigate the issue:

• Wait a minute after shaking up Keto Chow before drinking. Around here we tend to habitually give it a shake before taking a swig. However, that’s really not necessary since Keto Chow doesn’t settle or separate like most drinks (again: habit!) You’ll see the minerals settle to the bottom pretty quickly.
• If you tip the bottle back to get the last few drops, depending on how quickly you tip it and at how much of an angle, you may get a large quantity of the minerals. We notice this happens a lot when we dump a Keto Chow into an ice cream maker to whip up some soft-serve. The fix is to take a few more seconds to slowly pour the bottle.

One serving of the Keto Chow dry powder and contains less than 1g of fat and 26g of protein, and can therefore be used in conjunction with a Protein-Sparing Modified Fast. However, be aware that omitting fat will prevent the absorption of certain vitamins (A, D, K), and your Keto Chow will not be as filling.

We recommend mixing your Keto Chow with 10g of fat minimum to gain the full nutritional benefit of Keto Chow. Check out our walkthrough on using the Calorie Calculator to customize Keto Chow to fit your specific requirements.

Keto Chow is an ultra-low-carb meal replacement shake mix, to help you maintain nutritional ketosis. Combine it with a fat source of your choice (heavy cream, butter, oil) and water. One shake provides a third of your daily vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, electrolytes and more. It creates a meal replacement that is nutritionally complete.

People usually compare it to a “melted milkshake” though you can go full-on “frosty” by blending with ice or mixing in an ice cream maker.

We have some great preparation and mixing resources on our website. There are many ways to use Keto Chow:

• Mix it up one meal at a time in blender bottles.
• Prepare a couple of meals in a blender (try adding ice!).
• Make multiple meals at a time in a gallon size pitcher with an immersion blender.
• Use it in a recipe
• Turn it up a notch using our awesome flavor hacks!

Many people mix Keto Chow with heavy cream as the fat source. Heavy cream is comparatively low in lactose for the number of calories it contains. If you mix Keto Chow with 4oz of heavy cream, you’ll end up with 3.27g of lactose (roughly comparable to 2.4oz of whole milk). Many people who have problems with lactose are able to handle the relatively small amounts in Keto Chow without problems, or by using a lactase enzyme supplement. See this post for details.

If you want to eliminate heavy cream, there are options you can try. However, some will require a lot of calculations. I recommend using a tracking app like Cron-O-Meter to determine how the alternatives will impact your net carbs and other nutrients. Anyway, here are some possibilities you can try:

• Butter or clarified butter/ghee (using the mixing directions on this page)
• Coconut oil (using the mixing directions for butter above)
• Avocado oil
• Coconut cream
• A little MCT oil
• Avocados (blender required)
• One Keto Chow user uses 1/2 avocado, 1 tsp MCT oil, and 1 tsp olive oil per shake

If you want to eliminate dairy entirely, we do have several options for you here.

If you want to use MCT Oil (which is completely optional and not recommended if you’re just starting), you can use liquid oil or take capsules. However, the capsules are far more expensive.

The best available option we have for this is the Keto Chow Base Powder. It contains all of the vitamins and minerals in Keto Chow minus the protein powder, flavor, and sweetener. This allows you to choose your own protein powder, and tailor it to your preferences. It also costs a lot less to ship since it’s 20% smaller than a 21-meal bag.

This depends on the fat source you choose, and how fresh your fat source is. With heavy cream, a fresh package will keep Keto Chow good for six days before it starts to get weird. With butter or oil, they can last even longer.

Generally, I try to keep mine for 4-5 days at the most.

MCT oil is cool stuff for a ketogenic diet. Your liver will convert it almost directly into ketones. This can give you an energy boost or more “keto clarity” – the enhanced mental state that accompanies deep ketosis. The extra ketones can also help get you into ketosis faster and potentially raise your tolerance for carbs. However, MCT oil does not directly help with weight loss. It’s more of an added bonus if you’re already in ketosis.

MCT oil can also cause…” the runs.” Take more than your body likes and you will spend a lot of time on the toilet. Starting a ketogenic diet can often mess with bowels anyway. Therefore, we do not recommend using MCT oil when starting Keto or Keto Chow, specifically. If you’ve been doing keto chow for a while then you can start incorporating MCT oil if you like. Most people can’t handle more than 40ml a day even after doing keto for years.

Versions prior to Keto Chow 1.9 had instructions to use MCT oil. You may still find traces of that on the blog and other locations.

Another issue with MCT oil is that it tends to cause problems with the lipid system (lipoproteins and triglycerides, etc.). This was actually one of the things that Chris tested in the 100 Days of Keto Chow experiment. When he introduced MCT oil, it lowered HDL (bad) and raised triglycerides (also bad). The full analysis of the experiment with graphs and data can be found here.

That’s the Vitamin A, encapsulated to keep it from oxidizing. After mixing, the capsule dissolves and releases the vitamins, resulting in red-colored streaks within the mixture. It’s completely safe and will go away with a quick shake.

Whipping cream can work, it just has a lower fat content. Lower fat content means more lactose (sugar) which will make ketosis more difficult. Half-and-half has an even lower fat content and really a lot of sugar that will likely guarantee you won’t achieve ketosis.

Here are the calories and carbohydrate content for a 15ml/1 tablespoon “serving”:

Interestingly enough, all of the creams have less than 1g of carbs per “serving” so the package will say “0g total carbs” – even though the half-and-half has nearly 4x as many carbs per calorie compared to heavy cream. You have to muck around the USDA food database to get accurate nutrition information.

The shelf life of unopened Keto Chow is 2 years with no detectable change to the flavor or nutrition. You can read more about the accelerated shelf-life testing on our website. Each package has a “best by” date printed on the package that lets you know how long it will last.

The primary factor determining how long an opened bag of Keto Chow will last is humidity. If you live in an arid climate, you may have bags that are still fresh and tasty after 4-5 months. If you live in humidity, the powder may get clumpy and spoil after only a few days.

There are a few things you can do to combat the humidity:

• Use desiccant packets (the “DO NOT EAT” things you find in stuff)
• Store your bags in the freezer, not to keep them cold but because freezers tend to be crazy low humidity, and the cold doesn’t hurt either
• Get smaller bags or split up the large bag into smaller bags

All 21-meal bags of Keto Chow include a scoop for quick and easy measuring.

Depending on how you pack the scoop, it can come up short of a full serving by 2% or more. If you have a kitchen scale, we recommend using that for higher accuracy. This helps especially if you are tracking your food intake via Cron-O-Meter, MyFitnessPal, etc.

You CAN do it with just water or almond milk if you have a specific reason for doing that AND you are aware that not using fat will prevent the absorption of certain vitamins (A, D, K) and your Keto Chow will not be as filling, meaning it will just be a snack and not a meal. We generally only recommend doing this if you are doing something specific like a Protein Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF) and only for a short period of time. What we are trying to avoid is people not using fat because they still have the mentality that fat is bad and needs to be avoided. However, it’s not a good idea if you’re trying to do keto. Keto is a high-fat, moderate-protein, and low-carb nutrition plan. It is not low-fat, low-carb.

On keto, you need calories. We don’t recommend having more than a 15% calorie deficit while using Keto Chow. Water, almond milk, and other low-fat/low-calorie items won’t provide sufficient calories. Keto is all about living off fat.

Embrace the fat. Use heavy cream or avocado oil in your Keto Chow and put butter on your steak.

This depends on how much you added.

If you’ve added twice as much as you should, try adding more Keto Chow and water, enough for two servings. Otherwise, just add less in a subsequent meal to account for the overage.

We often drink Keto Chow warm, and also frequently use it in cooking and baking. Even the Savory Soups are meant to be consumed hot/warm.

Once Keto Chow reaches 120 degrees F and above, some of the nutrients may start to deteriorate. Even when it reaches that temperature, you will still receive excellent nutritional value. However, you would not want it to be your sole source of nutrition if you consistently heat it above 120 degrees.

We have a short video that explains what fats you can use.

I actually did a 100-day experiment where I didn’t eat anything BUT Keto Chow and different kinds of fats. The short version is: I like to use butter the best, then heavy cream. You can also use avocado oil, a little MCT oil, even coconut oil if you mix it the same as butter.

So, based on all that, it’s entirely up to you!

Chocolate Peanut Butter is simply the Chocolate flavor with added high-fat peanut flour. That adds to the mass and volume of the serving size. Therefore, the scoop is larger.

It’s a bit of an involved subject, but here’s the short version.

We don’t recommend having a caloric deficit higher than 15% off your BMR. For example, if you need 1875 calories a day, you need at least 85% of that from food (1593 calories). If you go lower than that, you risk crashing your metabolism and going into starvation mode. This will stall ketosis, and it’s subsequent fat. Our bodies are smart and know to reduce output when faced with too large of a deficit.

If you dive deeper into the science of it, you’ll also run into issues of high fasting insulin that keeps fat cells from releasing energy, even with low glucose levels. Thus you end up with no glucose, no fat, and no ketones to run your cells and everything slows down.

Absolutely! Keto Chow will work for any recipe you find that calls for protein powder. It’s a great substitute! In fact, we have an entire section of the blog dedicated to recipes that use Keto Chow as an ingredient.

Some simple math will solve this dilemma. Take your daily calorie target and divide it by two. You can then use our How To Chow graphic. This will help you determine how much fat you need for half of your daily calories in one shake.

On the Keto Chow instructions, it says to add 14 fl oz (or more) of water. Most like the taste and thickness when the total mixture is around 20 fl oz. or a nearly full Blender Bottle.

If you are mixing up Keto Chow with cold water:

In order to get the best TASTE, we recommend you allow your Keto Chow shake to refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, or preferably overnight. Allowing it to sit removes a harsh vitamin/metallic taste (30-45 minutes), and eliminates a lot of the saltiness (2-3 hours). As a result, you improve taste and texture.

Drinking immediately after mixing doesn’t hurt you, or cause you to lose health benefits.

If you are mixing up Keto Chow with warm or hot water:

In this case, all of the stuff is immediately dissolved, you CAN refrigerate it and reheat it later, or just drink it right away.

Starting with version 2.5.2 of Keto Chow (full changelog here), we switched to using Redmond Real Salt in Keto Chow.

• Real Salt tastes better than typical table salt.
• Real Salt is mined in Utah, just a few hours away from Keto Chow HQ.
• Real Salt has a lot of cool trace minerals that add to the flavor.
• …but Real Salt has a lot of cool trace minerals. Some of that shows up like sand at the bottom of your container.

So, lots of pros, with that one con. Most people will notice the bit of reddish “sand” at the bottom of the bottle and it’s not a big deal, but if you have a thicker viscosity (either you use less water, use heavy cream instead of butter, or you thicken the shake using a bit of gelatin/guar gum/xanthan gum) or take a drink IMMEDIATELY after shaking up your Keto Chow, you may get some of those un-dissolved minerals in your mouth. It’s harmless (actually it has some added iron and some manganese which your stomach acid will dissolve) but can be annoying to some people.

To mitigate the issue:

• Wait a minute after shaking up Keto Chow before drinking. Around here we tend to habitually give it a shake before taking a swig. However, that’s really not necessary since Keto Chow doesn’t settle or separate like most drinks (again: habit!) You’ll see the minerals settle to the bottom pretty quickly.
• If you tip the bottle back to get the last few drops, depending on how quickly you tip it and at how much of an angle, you may get a large quantity of the minerals. We notice this happens a lot when we dump a Keto Chow into an ice cream maker to whip up some soft-serve. The fix is to take a few more seconds to slowly pour the bottle.