The Best Keto Friendly Flour

the best keto friendly flour is grain4grain upcycled spent grain

The Best Keto Friendly Flour


Following a keto diet has been linked to certain health benefits, such as weight loss, reduced blood sugar, and lowered triglycerides just to name a few. While you may think that a diet heavy in animal products would increase cholesterol, the opposite has shown to be true in most cases. 

At its core, a ketogenic diet is low in carbohydrates and high in fat, but that description tends to oversimplify things. There are several foods and food groups that should be avoided when following a keto diet, as they affect your body’s ability to reach ketosis. Sugary foods, grains, and starches are at the top of the list, followed by most fruits, beans and legumes, and of course, alcohol and processed foods. While a keto diet may seem restrictive at first, once you get the hang of the foods you can and cannot eat, it becomes pretty easy to adapt some of your favorite recipes to a ketogenic diet. In fact, there are several keto friendly flour options that allow you to even enjoy bread and baked goods while maintaining a keto lifestyle! But as we’ll explore in this blog post, not all keto friendly flours are created equal. 


Yes, You CAN Eat Flour on Keto!


Following an alternative diet is so much easier these days than even just a few years ago. Food production has come a long way, and more and more companies are realizing that to keep up with consumer demand they need to offer options that are more than one-food-fits-all. 


In fact, consumer demand has led alternative flours to become more popular than ever. This is great news for consumers who, for health or allergy reasons, need to look past traditional wheat-based flours. Consumers today have more options than ever - but not all of these options are created equal.


  • Coconut flour is a popular keto flour, but it can be difficult to bake with, and tends to make everything taste a bit like coconut, which isn’t ideal if you’re making something like sandwich bread or pizza crust. It also has a tendency to soak up liquids during the cooking process, making cooking or baking with coconut flour difficult. Generally, coconut flour needs to be mixed with other flours to avoid this, which further complicates the baking process. Last but not least, it is pretty pricey compared to other gluten free flours, which can be a big drawback. 

  • Almond flour is another option, and is one of the most common grain free / keto friendly flours on the market. We’d like to see that change though, and not for the reasons you might think! While almond flour is a bit more versatile and adaptable than coconut flour, the production of almonds is really quite unsustainable. The water footprint of almond farming is huge - in fact, it takes almost 2,000 gallons of water to produce just one pound of almonds. As a company that considers environmental responsibility a major focus of our business, that statistic coupled with the fact that California produces 82% of the world's almonds and is currently in the midst of a massive drought, makes finding a more sustainable alternative flour pretty important. 

  • While rice flour and oat flour are gluten free, they are still high in carbohydrates, and thus unsuitable for anyone following a keto or paleo diet. 

Given the popularity of low carb and keto-friendly diets and the high demand for alternative flours, we think it’s important to find more sustainable keto-friendly flours that have a lesser impact on the environment and are suitable for most dietary restrictions. That’s why we started Grain4Grain.


Grain4Grain’s spent grain flour is the best keto friendly flour.  It costs less than a third of the cost of other alternative flours to produce, and it’s more sustainable to boot. Rather than the huge environmental footprint of other keto flours, spent grain flour actually conserves resources and keeps waste products out of landfills. 


The “Up”side of Spent Grain


At Grain4Grain, our gluten free, keto-friendly flour is produced from the barley remnants left over from beer production. Known as “spent grain”, this process upcycles the byproduct of the hugely popular beer industry, saving millions of pounds of waste from ending up in a landfill, and instead using it to produce a high protein, high fiber, and low carb flour that is a sustainable and environmentally friendly alternative to other keto friendly flours.


Spent grain flour is the best keto friendly flour and has a slightly nutty flavor.  It can be used to make pretty much any kind of baked good, from bread to brownies and cookies. It has 3 times the fiber of other wheat-alternative flours such as oat, and a comparable protein content to almond flour, without the negative environmental effects. In fact, spent grain actually helps the environment, rather than hurting it. 


Upcycling has become quite the buzzword in the conscious consumerism movement. Taking reusing and recycling up a notch, upcycling actually creates a superior product out of something that would normally go to waste. Spent grain is made by upcycling the byproducts of the barley used for brewing beer - a process that saves millions of pounds of year from heading to landfills. While this process used to take about 5-7 hours, we’ve developed a patent-pending technology that reduces this time to approximately 15 minutes. What does that mean? It means that not only is the environmental footprint of the spent grain production process much less than other alternative flours, but our process is even more efficient and sustainable than it used to be. 


We’ve all noticed the shelves and shelves of beer at our local grocery stores. Beer is a huge industry in America, creating millions of jobs. In fact, the United States’s beer production is the second largest in the world. Most consumers generally don’t think of what goes into the production of the over 190 million barrels of beer that the United States produces each year. The byproduct of such a massive industry is millions of pounds of spent grain - “waste” products that can either end up in landfills, or be used to create billions of pounds of spent grain flour, creating another sustainable industry as well as the best keto friendly flour!


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