Should You Use Ketone Supplements?

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At Mercola.com, Dr. Joseph Mercola discusses the pros and cons of ketone supplementation. He writes:

In this interview, Frank Llosa, founder and CEO of KetoneAid Inc., and I discuss the pros and cons of exogenous ketones (supplemental ketones). Your body makes ketones under certain conditions (so-called endogenous ketones), but you can also take them orally.

I used to take ketones, but over the past year or so have changed my position on this. I now believe that it’s relatively unhealthy for your body to create ketones on a chronic basis. Not that you should never do it, but it’s an emergency mechanism that requires the activation of stress hormones.

There’s great value to that, and it can keep you alive. But it’s an emergency response. You’re going to have to activate cortisol, adrenaline and glucagon, and that choice will worsen, not improve, your biology over time. That doesn’t mean ketones are dangerous. They’re a powerful tool that, when used selectively, can indeed improve your health. We’re discuss that in this interview.

But if you choose to allow your body to produce high levels of ketones, be aware that there’s another side to it that’s rarely ever discussed, which is the activation of the stress hormones. If you rarely do this there is no problem, as it is a rescue mechanism designed to keep you alive in times of food scarcity. But if you do it every day, I think you’re asking for trouble.

Llosa started exploring the exogenous ketones business by way of the late Dr. Richard Veech, a prominent ketone expert. Veech was his wife’s godfather. Veech had been sitting on a ketone ester for 10 years and couldn’t get it to market. So, that’s where Llosa got involved.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Ketones

While ketones are generally known to be good for your brain and lower inflammation, your brain cannot function on ketones alone. It’s biologically impossible. It requires glucose. Llosa cites research from the 1970s where they water fasted people for up to 60 days, and by the end they were able to produce energy through endogenous ketones alone.

However, once you understand how glucogenesis works, it’s clear that they still had glucose in the brain. Your body absolutely requires glucose, but you don’t have to eat it. However, it requires it so much that if you fail to consume glucose, it will sacrifice your muscles to create it endogenously.

Your body will break down muscle tissue and convert it into glucose by releasing the stress hormones adrenaline, glucagon and cortisol. That’s what activates the destruction of lean muscle mass and bones. Even some brain tissue may be sacrificed to create glucose. So, you must have glucose. If your blood glucose ever goes down to zero, you’ll die.

Ketones are indeed a great fuel, it does a lot of good things for your body, but you still need glucose. And if you want to really optimize your biology, the ideal way is to give your body the glucose it needs, along with a smaller amount of ketones. Two ways of doing that is by fasting (which activates stress hormones) or by taking exogenous ketones.

During a personal experiment, Llosa achieved very high ketone levels, but people started commenting that he looked sickly. While he felt great, he was underweight. His wife also experimented with a ketogenic diet and got the “keto flu.”

“She was in a fetal position in bed with her eyes bulging, heart racing,” he says. Llosa ended up calling on a couple of experts, who recommended giving her 10 capsules of pure salt. While he was skeptical, the salt had her feeling fine within 10 minutes. “It was just a salt depletion,” he says.

This tends to be a very common problem and is one of the reasons people say the keto diet didn’t work for them. Ketogenic diets cause tremendous salt loss, and most simply don’t add enough salt back in. All of that said, there are certainly benefits to ketones. The primary one being anti-inflammatory effects. Some also experience dramatic cognitive benefits. As explained by Llosa:

“For cognition, the more of an issue you have with glucose reaching the brain, the more of a benefit you have. So, some people will drink it, whether it’s any of these exogenous ketones and feel nothing in the brain. But your brain is being fueled by 100% or 95% [glucose], there is no improvement to be had.

Scientist Steve Koonin talked about the brain energy gap. So, the bigger the gap, the percentage of the brain that can be fueled by glucose, it could be 60%, 70%. When you add exogenous ketones, it uses a different pathway, reaches the brain and gets you closer to that 100%.

So, some people, for example, TBI [traumatic brain injured] people, they have brain fog, they take the ketone ester and it is instant, immediate, and predictable, within 15 minutes. So, the bigger the [energy] gap, the more you feel it.”

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