Most plain protein powders are fine on keto, and a shake can be one of the easiest ways to hit your protein target on a busy day. The catch is that the tub in your hand might be a clean 1 gram of carbohydrate a scoop or a sugary 15, and the label is where you find out which. This is a guide to picking the right powder, reading past the marketing, and knowing when a shake genuinely helps rather than just adding calories you did not need.
Coffee and keto go together so naturally that most people never stop to ask whether their daily cups are helping or quietly working against them. The reassuring headline is that black coffee and plain tea are about as keto-friendly as a drink can be: no carbohydrate to speak of, no calories worth counting, and no direct threat to ketosis. That said, caffeine is an active drug, not a neutral hot drink, and keto changes how your body handles it in a couple of ways worth knowing.
No, honey is not keto. A level tablespoon carries roughly 17 grams of carbohydrate, nearly all of it sugar, which is close to an entire day’s allowance if you are holding to 20 grams of net carbs. Honey behaves in the body much like table sugar, so however natural and wholesome it looks, it does not fit a ketogenic diet in anything beyond trace amounts.
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Brussels Keto is a small, independent site about the ketogenic diet and low-carb living, written for people doing it in Belgium. The aim is simple: give you the practical answer first, back it with evidence where the evidence exists, and be honest when it does not.
Who writes it Everything here is written by Hannah Reed. Hannah has eaten low-carb for years, reads the research rather than the headlines, and writes plainly.
Hannah Reed writes Brussels Keto. She has eaten low-carb for years, reads the research rather than the hype, and writes plainly for people doing keto in Belgium. She is not a doctor, and nothing here is medical advice.
I started this site because most of what I found about keto sat at one of two extremes. Either it promised miracles, or it warned you off in a panic. Neither matched what I saw living it day to day, or what the actual studies said when I sat down and read them.
Most of the worries about keto are vaguer than people think, but kidney stones are an exception: this is a real, documented risk with a clear mechanism, and it deserves a straight treatment rather than either dismissal or alarm. The good news is that the same understanding that explains the risk also tells you how to avoid it, and for the average person drinking enough water the danger is modest.
A keto weight loss plateau catches almost everyone: a few weeks of satisfying loss, then the scales stop moving, and the worry sets in that the diet has stopped working. Plateaus are normal, usually fixable, and rarely a sign that keto has failed. The trick is to diagnose the stall calmly rather than panic and crash harder, which tends to backfire. Here is how to think about it.
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MCT oil turns up in half the keto shopping baskets and most of the online advice, usually with a promise of sharper focus and deeper ketosis attached. It is a genuinely useful fat, but it is also oversold, and using it badly is a fast route to an uncomfortable afternoon. Here is a plain account of what it is, what it does, and how to fit it into keto without wasting money or regretting it an hour later.
People use “keto” and “low carb” as if they were interchangeable, and in casual conversation nobody minds. Nutritionally, though, they describe two different things. Every ketogenic diet is low carb, but plenty of low-carb eating never comes close to ketosis. Knowing where the line sits helps you pick the approach that suits your body and, just as importantly, one you can actually stick to.
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If you have keto blood work done, there is a fair chance your thyroid numbers will raise an eyebrow: free T3, the active thyroid hormone, often comes back lower than before. For anyone who has been told low thyroid is bad news, that reads like a warning light. The reality is more interesting, and for most people more reassuring, than the single number suggests. The short version is that a healthy thyroid usually adapts rather than fails on keto, but a few groups genuinely do need to tread carefully.