What do I think about Exogenous ketones

(Richard Morris) #1

Someone asked in Dr Fungs FB wall what people thought about Prüvit’s exogenous ketone product Keto//OS but rather than single out just that product (and I have a lot to say about the multi level marketing practices) I decided to comment generally about eating ketones, and repost here so people can find the post … because :nofb: : .

The point of being in ketosis for weight loss is to use body fat to make into ketones - eating ketones means you get to keep all your body fat.

The point of being in ketosis for Diabetes is you had to eat no sugar or starch in order to make ketones. For a diabetic eating no sugar or starch gives your liver a chance to make the perfect amount of glucose for you. If you eat ketones to get into ketosis then you will have the wrong amount of glucose and could lose a toe, your eyes, a kidney.

Plus ketones made in a vat are both left and right handed - we only use the right handed ones for energy. No-one knows what a caloric amount of the left handed ones for several decades will do to your cells. No-one.

If you want to eat ketones, better to eat MCT oils like Coconut oil and you will make them, the right kind, at about 1/100th of the cost of edible ketones.

Episode #69 - Show me the Science!
What's the benefits of drinking ketones
(Chris Bair) #2

I can’t be the only one around here that can almost literally hear @richard 's voice when reading his posts. I keep expecting to hear “yeahhh!” =)

Making your own ketones from old doughnuts is so much better than exogenous ketones. Hey cells, you want fuel? Tell the liver to make some! Problem with the MCT oil is the potential for… “bowel problems” - it’s also not necessary for weight loss. I’ll admit that replacing other calories with MCT isn’t a BAD idea but consuming extra calories via MCT oil isn’t a winner either.

(Jo Lo) #3

Good post, Richard.

There’s generally little point to consuming raw energy food-like substances. These include oil, sugar, exogenous ketones, MCT oil). These are all energy separated from food. They are not food. These can lead to fat gain, among other things. Most of us don’t need extra concentrated food energy…

Why do that?

It’s best to consume real food with high nutrient density. No?

(Genevieve Biggs) #4

As a former Prüvit promoter, I appreciate this post. :heart::heart::heart:

(Richard Morris) #5

Real food - yes.

I like food. It’s how I like to get my energy, raw materials and nutrition. I like to make it from first principles too so I get control over what goes into it. That’s why we ferment our own kimchi/yogurt/ginger beer, culture our own cheese, and cure our own bacon, emulsify our own mayo, etc. Not everyone takes it to that extreme, you have to find out what path works for you.

If drinking a BPC means you don’t need to eat for another 10 hours and that helps you reduce your daily insulin load … in my opinion that is a good thing if the alternative is you have to have 3 meals a day with snacks. Also sometimes when extended fasting and exercising I supplement with concentrated energy in the form of a small amount of butter, people with a lot less body fat than me will likely have to do that more often to protect their lean mass even if they are overweight. So there are contexts where eating energy separated from food makes sense.

(Sara Lamberto) #6

Can supplementing early on in the transition to keto help reduce some of the negative keto flu side effects or will it possibly just prolong the process?

(Richard Morris) #7

The reason we get keto flu symptoms is apparently the drop in sodium as our kidneys stop trying to hold onto it - which they do when insulin is high. I don’t think it would affect that at all.

As for the process of ketoadaptation where you become better at burning fat for energy, that is a process of up-regulating transports across your cell walls for ketones (Mono carboxylate transports) and fats and down-regulating the transports for glucose, and increasing the production of cellular enzymes for metabolizing fats. A sudden influx of surprise ketones would only push an adaptation for one of those - the monocarboxylate transports that carry ketones across cell walls.

I don’t know what the effect of changing one of these things out of context would be. But Dr Ben Bikeman mentioned during his presentation at Low Carb Breckenridge that high ketones because glucose and insulin are low is a physiological state that the human body was designed for. High ketones while both glucose and insulin is high is a confused state for the body and that could prolong keto adaptation.

(Sara Lamberto) #8

Thank you for the additional information! I was initially considering an exogenous ketone supplement b/c I guess I was hoping to “train” my body to burn ketones. Obviously, faulty logic :slight_smile: Despite eating 20g or less of carbs daily my lowest glucose reading has been 79 and that also happened to be my lowest ketone reading which was .3. Probably means I am eating too much protein I guess.Thanks again!

(Richard Morris) #9

You will get there.

The ketones we make are made within context, so the more we make the better we become at shuffling about all the things we need to make more. As you make more your brain will need less glucose until it reaches it’s happy place in roughly 6 weeks where it is running 75% on ketones and you are needing to make very little glucose (just 25% of the brains energy requirements and just enough to feed other glucose dependent tissue like red blood cells).

Anything that raises insulin will depress ketone production (that is why type 1 diabetics who can’t make insulin, if they don’t inject it they can make so many ketones it makes them sick). Carbs raise insulin, protein does too by about 56% of the amount of carbs. Not getting enough sleep can raise insulin, so can stress … so the best advice I can offer is keep calm and keto on.

(Nathanael Schulte) #10

I’ve been thinking through this topic myself, and I do take MCT oil on occassion, but it’s not all the time (I take KetoMCT specifically https://ketomct.com/)

I have not taken any other exogenous ketone supplements, and haven’t been willing to spend the money.

So here’s my take - I find it helps when I’m under a lot of stress, short on sleep, or it’s been rainy and overcast, and I’m having a hard time getting out of a depressive state. It definitely helps as a mood booster, but it doesn’t really compete with my good days, when I’m well rested and getting enough sun.

At the rate I take it, that $38 bottle of oil will last me a good 3-4 months, because I don’t take it more than a couple days a week at the most, and when summer is here, it’s a lot less than that. I kind of look at it like my CPAP: I also don’t plan on having to use it the rest of my life. Some day, the weight will be down, and I won’t have to use either one, but in the meantime, I will use anything that helps.

#11

i agree that endogenous ketone production is best. Exogenous ketones have shown to lower blood sugar. There is some signaling that occurs with exogenous ketones.

(Ann) #12

Hi Richard,

Is your position still the same on this? I heard there are some new developments in this area, but I don’t really know how to look.

Cheers!

(Richard Morris) #13

New information I am aware of is that there is more evidence about how we metabolize the unusual isoform of betahydroxybutyrate - which I didn’t know about until recently. What we don’t know is whether this pathway can process a caloric amount (>7g/day) of ketones for a generation (30+ years) without causing significant derangement - and the mitochondria is an organelle you really don’t want deranged.

The other thing that is new is that there is a mechanistic argument that in our body we make acetoacetate first and then BOHB which we convert back to acetoacetate to use for energy. That reversible reaction in one direction moves our redox state from oxidation to reduction and back again. By taking in BOHB (already converted) we run the risk of putting out thumbs on the scale of our cellular redox state.

Both of these might be trivial and easily ignored in small amounts, but in large caloric doses often enough then that could be more of a problem.

Yes: I still think MCT oil is the best way to fast track yourself to higher ketone levels because it’s all in the correct context.

(Ann) #14

Thank you!