This morning I measured my ketones on the older keto mojo and they read .3. I fasted all day and had a drink with exogonous bhb, and a few hours later the ketones were .5.
A few hours later, still fasting they measured .2! so i decided to check my other hand, my right hand. it measured .8. I thought, dang thing can repeat a measurement, that’s bad. but then i checked left again and it was .2. checked right again, .8 again. WTH???
My husband has different results within 5 mins. of a first test on the same finger. All the manuals state a + or - percentage of accuracy. He is diabetic and just walks and eats lchf to control his numbers, his drs. are amazed that he keeps them as low as he does without their meds that they said were needed to get any lowering.
Relax and just enjoy the good eats and results from this way of eating.
There’s a certain measurement error that’s inherent in the testing technology, but this difference you’ve described seems a bit more than I would’ve guessed.
Having said that, when the figures are smaller (closer to zero), the “degrees of freedom” are affected such that error ranges can loom larger as a percentage.
One other possible issue is that, as others have reported, if you aren’t careful to wash your hands, your blood test can easily pick up contamination on your hand(s). It mighrt be possible that one hand was contaminated with something that registered as a ketone. More likely with a glucose test but … who knows?
Eager to hear from others who understand the ketone test tech better.
I have a picture somewhere using three ketone meters and getting 0.2, 0.4, and 0.8 mmol/l. There’s a lot of error in these things.
They’re really just for gross approximation of ketones. You can’t get them to be that accurate.
Just try different fingers on the same hand as the next experiment.
I often get variation on blood glucose or blood ketone from a variety of finger prick test methods. If I am picky I use the blood drop from the same puncture for both tests.
That allows the subjective choice of choosing the results that match most closely to how one intuitively feels. It’s a good lesson in data collection variability.
Your blood isn’t a perfect mix of anything, any blood measurement will have decent variations, and is only a look at a snapsnot in time.
In theory, this should not happen. Contamination is likely the cause of the different readings. Wash hands thoroughly and/or wipe contact with an alcohol pad. Blood strips should not touch the skin when taking a reading. If it continues to give you different left to right readings, call the manufacturer.
True, but even that story doesn’t make sense if you don’t have a hold on everything you’ve been doing during that timeline, which even as a crazy tracker, I’ve screwed myself over on that one a handful of times. One of the reasons I didn’t see my Thyroid going to crap over the years, even though I had that info the whole time, wasn’t putting together what was right in front of my face.