First Ketone Ester for sport


(ianrobo) #1

First this is VERY expensive but as you can see it is being marketed for sport and is a move on from where we are previously.

Personally I would never use these as I believe I would create enough anyway but the marketing of Keto is being stepped up now.

thoughts @richard


(Richard Morris) #2

I think it’s a source of energy you can use in addition to the maximum rate you can draw energy from body fat, and from food absorption. If you are Chris Froome and about to burn through some 10,000 calories on a bike then taking something like this as well as starches during and fatty meals before a race …then it might give you an edge. It may or may not be safer than the monkey glands or whatever alchemical voodoo TdF cyclists are abusing their bodies with.

Of all the exogenous ketones TΔG is the only one I know of that is non-racemic, so this one I might actually try one day. And it is the same one that Sky racing and the British Olympic rowing team allegedly use.


(ianrobo) #3

see it was developed with Cambridge Uni so guess that there is science about it. BTW it is being marketed saying ditch those sugary drinks !


(Crow T. Robot) #4

According to Dr. Richard Veech, ketone esters are also a treatment for concussion. He says that the damage that comes from concussion is actually from the brain temporarily not taking up glucose properly (best recollection) and taking ketones quickly after the trauma could prevent the damaging effects. I know if I were are rich football team owner, I would make sure the medics bag was fully stocked with ketone esters. Cheap insurance, I say.


(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #5

Last I heard it was unknown if the ketones had to be taken prophylacticaly to have an effect or if they could be taken shortly after. Do you have any more recent science answering this question?

It could make sense to take them beforehand in any case, but I’ve also read that ketones themselves have an inhibitory effect on glucose utilization that would decrease anaerobe performance and therefore wouldn’t be helpful in certain sports. Again, the science here is not well explored yet.


(Richard Morris) #6

Dr Veech was a cocreator of TΔG with Keiren Clarke - so he would know, but he also might have a commercial incentive to talk them up.

His ketone ester is non-racemic. As I understand it there are ketone esters that are racemic, and all salts are racemic. Racemic ketones are ones that contain both right handed ketones which we can use, and left handed ones which we can’t. Dr Veech’s product contains only the right handed ketones … which is a lot more expensive to make, but out of an abundance of caution I wouldn’t personally touch the racemic ones.


(ianrobo) #7

And here comes the inevitable BS article and PR that only damages our WOE https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/keto-in-a-bottle/545129/

Let me state if you are Keto/ fat adapted then this is a total waste of time and more importantly money. If are into endurance sports forget it because you can just get all he benefits from drinking or eating some fat before or during sport.


(Jason Fletcher) #8

This could help decrease the demand for glucose need for the brain during long runs. If supplemented over glucose during a race I wonder if the esters would cause more or less gastro intestinal distress from ingestion then glucose?


(ianrobo) #9

same story different spin …

but they IMHO do nothing unless you are already fat adapted


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #10

My understanding is that the other-handed compounds won’t hurt you, but they won’t do you any good, either. So it’s more your pocket-book than your body getting damaged.


(Richard Morris) #11

We know the enzyme that we use to turn D-betahydroxybutyrate into Acetoacetate so we can use it for energy only works on the D- isoform and not the L- one. Although we do know that Acetoacetate is non-chiral … as in it has no mirror twin so if there is a way to get L-betahydroxybutyrate to Acetoacetate then our problems are solved.

The only experimental test that I am aware of to test what we do with the L- isoform was the tracer studies of Henri Brunengraber, who made a few micrograms of L-betahydroxybutyrate that was tagged with a radioactive isotopes, and gave it to a mouse. Some of the tagged carbon appeared in the exhalation of the mouse indicating that some of the L-betahydroxybutyrate had somehow made it into the respiration process. As I understand it the actual pathway that it took to get there is still unknown.

The questions I have are;

Why not all of it? What happened to the molecules that didn’t end up being used for energy. I assume that the mechanism for mice is the same as for humans … but I don’t plan on being the guinea pig if that assumption is in error. How much of a caloric amount (enough betahydroxybutyrate to be considered a minor energy source) would end up making it into respiration. We don’t know the pathway … is it competing for transports and enzymes with some other critical molecule? Would a caloric amount cause a back up of some other critical process … as yet unknown? How about a caloric amount for a fraction of an animals lifetime? That would be a different order of magnitude than a few micrograms “once off”.

I may be unnecessarily alarmist about this but one of my concerns is that this part of a cellular machinery, it’s energy production, is subject to derangements from seemingly minor changes … like making not enough of critical enzymes that then cause major systemic diseases for the organism - like Diabetes, or Parkinsons, or a host of horrible diseases.

If we couldn’t isolate the right isoform, and assuming it was essential to cure some diseases then that would be a trade-off that well informed individuals would have to make. But we CAN make isolated D-betahydroxybutyrate, it’s just expensive.

People aren’t being told by the manufacturers of the racemic mix of DL-betahydroxybutyrate of the concerns. They are just labeled as GRAS (generally recognized as safe) by the FDA without much evidence … other than the fact we appear NOT to have killed anyone with it in the few years that it’s been readily available on the market. I would hope the manufacturers might pay for that actual research … but this is not a question that anyone appears to want to know the answer to. Besides some of the manufacturers of ketone salts were involved in making illegal anabolic agents for athletes around the turn of the century and at least one did time for the Balco scandal. That kind of thing makes my Spidey sense tingle.

As a podcaster I regularly get offered free ketones. Often the first email is “So what flavour do you want” … and my response is “what science do you have that indicates benefit for weight loss or treatment of type 2 diabetes” … and I usually don’t get a second email.

If I had an elderly relative with a degenerative disease that could be treated with exogenous ketones, I might relent because if there is a problem that shows up after 30 years of using a caloric amount of them … well that wouldn’t impact a geriatric with a 10 year anticipated horizon. Also a product taken like medicine that does not require dietary compliance may be an easier solution for a geriatric especially if they are in a geriatric facility where the diet is pretty woeful.

On the other hand a young person who is capable of making all the ketones they want by just not eating carbs, who just wants to have the ketones AND eat carbs … well that would in my opinion be a silly use of exogenous ketones, and potentially a dangerous one.

I could also be completely wrong about all this.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #12

Well, the standard thinking is that laevorotatory and dextrorotatory isomers are chemically identical so that most chemical processes should affect them equally.

On the other hand, chirality matters to the behavior of biologically active chemicals. For most chemicals, it is the dextrorotatory form that that human body uses, but occasionally it is the laevorotatory form. And the standard thinking has always been that the unused isomer is unusable but harmless—simply inert, where the body is concerned. Arthur C. Clarke, in fact, wrote a short story in which a character is accidentally altered so that he cannot use the dextrorotatory biologicals—they simply fail to nourish him. (The rest of the plot is about what happens when they try to unalter him.)

Then, again, we know the dangers of where standard thinking can sometimes take us.


(Richard Morris) #13

Interestingly glucose and fructose are also isomers - they are both C6H12O6 but they are lot more differently constructed than stereo isomers like D-glucose and L-Glucose, and of course they are totally different.

We think of molecules having chemical behaviors because of their constituent atoms, but most life processes happen because of the shape of the molecules - enzymes have docking sites that accept the shape of one or more molecules they will work on to cleave or join. This is why enzymes are usually chiral if the molecules they work upon are chiral.

Chirality of molecules can be important. Thalidomide for example is chiral; the D- form is a sedative that has anti nausea effects commonly prescribed for women with morning sickness. The L- form is teratogenic causing children to be born with malformed or missing limbs. Made in a lab it is racemic - equal parts D- and L- stereoisomers.

Life on this planet appears to favour L- isomers of amino acids, and D- isomers of carbohydrates. The way that evolution of life worked, once an orientation was chosen it became overwhelmingly preferred. In other words there was a virtual coin toss and whichever side the coin landed on all life followed that path.

I have seen two interesting theories about the chiral preference of amino acids.

One is that the weak nuclear force is unique among the fundamental forces in that it is chiral and electrons produced by radioactive decay come out preferring a spin in one direction … and they would preferentially degrade D-aminos which might have tipped the scales in favour of life being based on L-amino acids. So that would mean that more life in our universe uses L-aminos than D-aminos.

My favourite tho is the theory that posits that because our galaxy has a chiral spin and a magnetic orientation, cosmic dust therefore polarizes star light in one specific orientation and that would preferentially degrade D-aminos. So that would mean that just in our galaxy life is more L-amino than D-amino … and in another galaxy that spins the other direction it would be the other way around.


(ianrobo) #14

Headline is bollox but actual the details are quite good

Clearly those producing these testers are good st PR !


(joe churchill ) #15

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I think this is the closest relevant thread I could find to my question… One concern about exogenous ketones is that the handedness is a mix of both.

I was wondering with coconut and MCT oil if that is a concern as well? I know they metabolize more readily to ketones, but am not able to figure out if they too have the same issue?


(ianrobo) #16

a fair few threads on this but lets call in @jayerdahl who has been discussing this


(Jay Erdahl) #17

Thanks, @ianrobo - I have been documenting my own experiments, and another member has also started an experiment with a different Exogenous Ketone, at this thread:

In a nutshell, I’ve had some good and bad results. I have been completely fat adapted for 3 years and run anything from 21 minute 5Ks to 24 hour 100 mile races. I’ve been a big fan of Generation UCan and Coconut Oil for all distances marathon and beyond, and last year experimented with adding different carb fuels for the shorter races and the end of the longer races. I’m experimenting with the EKs at all distances and in different training runs.

This is an amazing thread, and I’m going to read a lot of the articles, as well as point back to it in the other topic.