Keto urine sticks or blood checker what’s best?!

(Sammi) #1

I’d love to no what’s best for checking ketones and are the urine sticks better when you first urinate (first wee of the day) or should it not matter?! Thanks! :blush:

(Kyle Kerstiens) #2

Sammi a few points and you can decide

Strips only measure ketones that leave your body as waste. This means low readings could mean you body is simply effective at using ketones and not many are wasted. So in reality the sticks normally only tell you if ur in or out of ketosis. Drinking MCT oil for example can lead to a dark test strip as a false positive. Doesn’t mean ur in ketosis…just excreted ketones

The blood testing meter is expensive and the strips for them are around a dollar each. I have one and love it. I do blood glucose and ketones both. It’s accurate but still there is no way to know how effective your body is using ketones. Ives just learned through experience in ketosis what my levels mean for my body only.

My recommendation is to get the test strips for anyone new until you are a little while in and sticking to it. No sense in spending the money up front. Just my .02.

(Robert C) #3

I recommend buying both. The blood testing is so much more expensive that, if you’re willing to buy them, you may as well grab 100 strips (which is several month’s worth).

The strips can then be used more frequently like daily or twice daily. While they can have false positives after drinking MCT oil or inaccuracies due to under/over hydration - you can just skip the test if you just had a lot of oil/fatty food, are really thursty or drank a quart of water recently. But, if you are moderately hydrated and it has been a while since you have eaten and then you get no coloration on the strip - that’s the time to think back about anything new you are doing recently but also the time to use the blood test to confirm whether it is low. If the blood test comes back low also then either you are super efficient with using up all of the ketones you create or you aren’t creating them.

The other time to use a blood test (cost effectively) is to just get a number once a week. If you are 1.7 one week and 0.9 the next week - you might want to think about dietary or sleep or stress changes that have brought that number down. The 1.7 to 0.9 difference would be very difficult to spot on test strips given your trying to figure out which of 3 boxes your strip looks most like.