Will one become better at intense fat burning during exercise if one is in ketosis to a relatively greater degree?
I can not run at 80% of max heart rate while in ketosis. I hope to get there. Will I get there faster if my ketones are 2.5 all the time instead of 1.5 all the time? If so, how do I get more ketones? Will 10g net carbs daily produce more ketones than 30g net carbs daily?
I know that Dr. Phinney has said that he stays above 0.5 ketones with 50g carbs daily. Many others in this forum seem to have less carbs and more ketones. Is there an advantage to that?
try it! you have to experiment for things like this because so much depends on the individual. I have found that body goes through so many changes with this that you basically turn a little mad scientist sometimes to see what works for you.
You sound like a bit of a numbers fanatic though which i am not. If I want to run faster I just swig some coconut oil And run fast. If i want to burn up stored fat i just dont eat and run slow until I am borderline passing out. I try to focus more on what and how I am feeling more than things like numbers.
There are therapeutic advantages for people that have metabolic diseases, and need to get their Glucose Ketone Index (GKI) down below 1.0. From an athletic standpoint, I’m not sure that it matters. I’ve had anything from 0.3 to 6.8 while riding bicycle, and haven’t noticed any performance bump, but I really am not enough of a competitor to notice or care.
Dr. Volek, in his April 24, 2014, lecture claimed that we do not yet know if ketones of 3.5 is better than 1.5. He said all he thinks is that more than 0.5 mmol/L gives advantages in some ways.
This is in his answer to the first question at the end of the lecture.
Interestingly this has been discussed on my FB page today. It was a topic of discussion at the last LC conference apparently another would seem to be some rethinking and assessing going on. Apparently Phinney and Noakes both maintain around 0.4 which will tell you something.
In podcast episode 43, “Optimizing Nutrition with Marty Kendall,” published: 12/5/2016, Richard said that Dr. Phinney said that Dr. Volek has endurance athletes remaining in ketosis with ketones at 0.3. This was a brief comment, but I think that gist of it is is that 0.3 was chosen as being optimal in some way and it wasn’t just an experiment to see if they could stay in ketosis. In episode 49, Richard said that some of those athletes are in ketosis at 0.2.
And there is the KIKO theory that ketone level results from what is produced and burned. So maybe a high ketone level is due to poor utilization or a low level is due to great utilization.
I would like to know how to better optimize diet but I doubt it would be an easy one size fits all answer as we have so many different issues. We tend to measure things that are easy like weight, blood glucose and to a lesser degree ketones, But to optimize for our idividual health conditions we would probably need to track many things that are hard such as hormones, enzymes and other factors. Considering how poorly the professional medical community is addressing conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer and how little consensus there is on diet in general I expect it will be a long time before the subtleties of optimizing a keto diet will be worked out.
This is the main reason I didn’t respond to this topic before now, because I think the only answer at the moment is, “it depends”.
The only objective criteria that seems to be getting a consensus is the Glucose Ketone Index (GKI) where lower ratios are better and it is based on blood ketones, so this would imply that being into ketosis to a greater degree is “better” in some general sense, but more specifically when looking at the therapeutic value in Diabetes, Alzheimers, and Cancer to name a few.
If someone is trying to determine what’s “better” and only eating ketogenically for weight loss, the Respiratory Quotient (RQ) would be a better indicator since it’s a direct measurement of how much fat is being burned, but we can’t live in a sealed metabolic ward to get that measurement making it impractical.
my interpretation was: These were fat adapted elite athletes who were probably very effectively using ketones as fuel and not much was hanging around in the blood to be messured
One of the early phases of keto-adaptation is generating ketones in the liver (ketogenesis) and then burning ketones as fuel throughout the body, which would correlate with higher blood ketones, but Phinney and Volek have said that in a later phase, the muscles reduce their ketone utilization and start burning fatty acids directly, leaving the ketones for the brain which can’t burn fatty acids, resulting in fewer ketones being generated - hence an implication that at some point lower blood ketones can imply more optimal adaptation.
This makes sense to me, but especially what’s seen in athletes since the earlier phase involves the entire body running mostly on ketones when glucose is low, and the limitation is the rate of ketogenesis. In other words, an athlete’s performance limitations in the early phase are limited by how fast the liver can generate ketones, but when their muscles can run on fatty acids directly, they don’t have to wait on the liver for their energy.
I also think that at the later stages, so many cells have adapted to burning either ketones or fatty acids, that the ketones don’t exist in the bloodstream as long, so detecting them in the blood before being they can utilized is harder, resulting in lower blood ketones.
