Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 532: Dr. Dom D'Agostino on Bogus Keto Claims, Value of Keto Supplements, Fat Loss & the Ketogenic Diet, War Fighter Performance & MORE

Episode Date: June 19, 2017

A few months back Dom D'Agostino came to the Mind Pump Media Studio to speak with Sal, Adam and Justin. The episode could not be aired because of some unannounced NASA program that was spoken about in the episode. After months in the Mind Pump archive you can now hear Dom speak a large number of topics including bogus claims from people jumping on the keto bandwagon, what keto supplements really do, who shouldn't do the ketogenic diet, keto vs. Modified Atkins, fat loss and ketogenic diets, war fighter performance and more. Listen to this episode to learn about the NASA program that Dom is participating in as well as get the latest research on the ketogenic diet and its benefits. Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Got a beard? Condition your beard with Big Top Beard Company’s natural oils and organic essential oil blends to make it not only feel great but smell amazing! Get Big Top Beard Company products at www.bigtopbeardcompany.com, code "mindpump" for 33% off. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!

So check this out. We have something available called 30 days of coaching and we give it for free and this is what it is. You go on our site, mindpumpmedia.com, you opt in and you get access to a bunch of different topics that we consider to be the most important when people are getting started in fitness and wellness. Everything from basic topics like protein, sphats, carbohydrates, and calories to more complex topics like your metabolism, to other topics that are included in wellness, things like meditation. And what we do is we send you episodes where we've talked about these things in detail and we timestamp them. So you can listen to what we say

about these particular topics in detail. And plus we give you more information. It's all free and it's our way of giving back to the Mind Pump listeners. And the way you get it is you go to MindPumpMedia.com and sign up, and it costs nothing. So just recently, we had an opportunity to hop on a show, Travis Marziani, great kid, man.

And we had an opportunity to try out his performance nut butter. And all of us absolutely loved it. This kid, it's really great to watch what he's doing. And just his work ethic, the thought that he's put into putting this product out, it looks amazing. It tastes amazing. It's all, it's all natural. It's keto, it's vegan. It's, it's, it's, it's macadamia coconut and cashew nut butter all together. And it's phenomenal. And it's Vegan, it's Macadamia, Coconut, and Cashew Nut Butter all together and it's phenomenal. He's trying to launch this company.

One of the things about Mind Pump, we've been this way since day one, is we've turned down a lot of people that we could have done affiliations with to make money. One of the things we all agreed on is that anything that we'd ever talk about would be stuff that we support. Even a company like this that can't pay us any money, isn't huge, isn't gonna be a major affiliate. He's trying to launch his IndieGoGo right now and get this business up and running,

and we want to help support him. So if you guys want to help us out to help him, go to mindpumpbutter.com. You can check out his IndieGoGo right now and try some of this stuff out. Even if you guys just try a simple sample, it helps him out. And you'll see you'll love it because I know all of us love it. And give us great feedback, please afterwards,

because anything we can do to help support him and help him grow this business. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, up, mind, up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews Holy shit, we're finally dropping the Dom-D Yeah, my God! So we know you guys, I have you have been fasting, waiting Chris

It's Christmas! You may be dead I know, I know we've had fans that have been waiting to hear the Dom-D episode We have been waiting for approval from NASA. Those motherfuckers over there. He's not lying. That's the truth. We recorded this episode a long time ago.

Dom came to visit us. We recorded an awesome podcast with him. We talked about, of course, ketogenic, ketogenic, ketone. Well, we talked about super top secret shit that goes down with NASA. And that was the reason he, right away, said, listen, boys, as much fun as we had,

all the great stuff that we revealed and talked about You cannot release that episode until I get approval from NASA. We literally got the approval yesterday We're dropping NASA stamp. We are dropping it for you guys So you guys can now listen to it you guys get insider information on what's going up on Mars This is pretty cool for anybody else. This is pretty cool And now Dom was selected as one of only four crew members for the NASA Extreme Environment Mission's Operations Expedition.

He's going to go to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for 10 days on June 18th, simulating a deep space mission with similar objectives for exploration on Mars. And I think this is about how to use ketones and all that stuff. It's a great episode. You're gonna love it. So here we are talking to Dr. Dom Diagostino. You know, Dom, what it's you know talking about business and things like that.

You know, and you're a major research guy. So what it how do you look at what you're doing like business wise like the future of what you're doing? Do you think care about like do you have any sort of monetary drive whatsoever you just research, like, where's your head at with that? Yeah, that's an interesting topic, because we were discussing that walking here, actually. We realized that a lot of people are latching on to what we're doing, whether it be an idea or intellectual property, even that we're generating through

and making a lot of money. And I would like to develop a model, which is kind of outside of convention from an academic, academia perspective, but to develop a model where the public interest in what we're doing is generating revenue that can feed back into developing the science and the application of the things that we're doing, whether it be a specialized ketogenic diet, a supplement, or a very comprehensive metabolic-based therapy for whether it be cancer, epilepsy, or Navy, you know, Navy seal application, or NASA application, or something like that. But to develop a business model, and I think it's going to take some thought and creativity and maybe innovation to do it, that instead of trying to beg the government, the NIH,

I saw it was getting like a 20% cut in their funding And that's where I'm supposed to be getting you know money for for my research, but to do it through other channels and because you really need to keep reinventing yourself and be innovative if you're a researcher an investigator that wants to fund a lab and pay salaries. I think the challenge that you have with that is what you guys, I'm sure you guys are aware of, is from the research side, from the science side, you follow these protocols, you have hypothesis, you test them, you, you know, there's peer-reviewed process. The market side doesn't have any of that. So you could come out and be like,

hey, you know, it looks like maybe, you know, ketones might have, you know, points in the direction that might have a fat burning quality, but we're gonna study further and we're gonna look deeper into that. And the next thing you know, there's five supplement companies like fat burner with new ketones.

Already making a shit ton of money up the research that you started. Yeah. Well, that's a of money up the research that you started. Yeah. Well, that's a challenge, just competing with that speed. That's, yeah, if they're, you know, making the claims, they need to point to the science.

So that's, I mean, we're reaching out to the companies that are selling these products and saying, hey, if you are gonna make these claims, you gotta put your, you know, your pocketbook where your mouth is and start funding studies. There's a lot of neurological applications, potentially performance, anti-cancer, things

like that from preclinical animal data and maybe, you know, some emerging human studies, but I mean, I'm going to call companies out and say, you know, we're kind of the people who started this and you're misrepresenting technology and the supplements by doing that. I think a good way to do that would be to be really open with that, rather than contacting them privately, having a site and saying, these following supplement companies are making erroneous claims in regards to ketone and then listen because that would be like if I was a supplement company That would be the last place right I'd want my my company to be on and so it sounds like a great page for mind pump media

I feel yeah, well if you don't do it, we'll do it. We might have to talk more into this after this podcast is over because I feel like that's what we're all Like examine dot com. They they do a little bit of like vetting with that. I love Xamarin.com, but they don't call specific companies. Yeah, they don't get that aggressive. I mean, we have no problem getting that aggressive, but I can see that, because now you're looking at fire with fire, you know what I mean? Because they're really crafty at maneuvering around and taking their time, and then finally they get five letters

from you, and oh no, looks like we're going to court, fine, we're gonna stop, or we're gonna change our wording a little bit. By that point now, millions of people have bought their shit. Right, the message is out. We've send a lot of cease and desist to various companies. And I have actually called them out

more like two their lawyers are university did. And the model that I encourage companies to do is to do, to educate, to bring, to pay people, like Rob Wolfe and academics and scientists to actually speak to the distributors and the representatives who are marketing this technology. And before, and have that mandatory, before they go out and do

sales and be that you know they they would the company would pay for that to happen because otherwise they could be shooting themselves in the foot if they go out there and make all these crazy claims without promoting the science by science I mean peer-reviewed publications and there's quite a lot of it out there and it's going if if you look on PubMed, it's going up exponentially because there's... It's growing. There's so much interest right now in your field. But they need to understand what these supplements are and what they are not. And by promoting what they are not, that's kind of shooting themselves in the foot. Now, Dom, what are some of the crazy claims that you're seeing right now?

You don't have the name companies or anything, but what are some of the things you're seeing that you're like, no, that's not accurate or we just don't know yet in regards to, you know, key tone science or key to genetic science? Well, just quite a few, but the scenario that happens is that you get one or two people that get this crazy response, they lose like a hundred pounds and then they're

promoting the ketones supplement for that and they just happen to be a distributor too. So this is the scenario. I do get a lot of emails from people who do not go public with their story from parents that have kids, for example. So the ketogenic diet, you guys probably know the only clinical application for is for seizure disorders. And it works remarkably well for that, even when drugs fail.

And in some cases, it doesn't work or it doesn't get full seizure control, but and supplements should not be marketed for this yet, but they, when used in conjunction with a ketogenic diet, they can further augment the therapeutic efficacy of the ketogenic diet to the point where it is now controlling seizures. A lot of times, we're very specific metabolic disorders, but even for just general epilepsy. But you have that will come out, some kind of story or anecdotal report will come out,

and then companies will say, oh, look, it's the supplement. It's not the diet where it's usually the diet and the supplement. The bar. Yeah, like the parents are working with Johns Hopkins, clinical dietitian to set up the diet. And it's not quite working to where they want it. And then they add a supplement. They kind of go outside of the realm of conventional medicine.

And then supplement companies will sometimes harp on that and say, look, the diet cures epilepsy, or the ketone supplement cures epilepsy. Well, so we know that's pretty established now that ketogenic diet and ketones benefit people with epilepsy or epileptic disorders. But there's lots of anecdote out there with ketogenic diets on almost all neurological type disorders.

Yeah, even brain injury, which is a big one, concussions, and that could be probably one of the biggest. So why is that? Because obviously it's not specific to the disorder of epilepsy. There's obviously some general thing that it's doing at its core that is benefiting all these issues that you may have with your brain and neurological system. What is that? Why is that happening?

Keytones are just a cleaner fuel for us. For the brain, is that what it is? That's a part of it, but with traumatic brain injury, what you have is, if you do a scan on someone like a soldier, even a guy that takes a big hit to the head, and you look at, you do a, and what's called an FDG PET scan, a glucose PET scan, and that's dim in certain areas, that's your best predictor about how that guy will recover, right? And if it's a penetrating traumatic brain injury like from an IED or something like that, you have an 85% chance that you're going to have seizures with that because seizures are really common with multiple concussions and even with hard hit, you know, traumatic brain injury.

So it makes sense to use a diet that we know is more effective than drugs for seizures to do that for TBI. But the faster you restore normal brain energy metabolism, the faster that you're going to recover from traumatic brain injury, and also the neuroinflammation, and I just went to Europe and had a talk on this. Now they have a scan that can look at inflammation in the brain, and the diet seems to be working in that regard, and we know ketones have an anti-inflammatory effect. So they may be work in not only by restoring normal brain, energy metabolism or homeostasis, but suppressing some of the neuroinflammation

that's associated with CTE, which is that chronic inflammation that the guys get. Like the NFL, right? And they have a big thing with the NFL, yeah. Yep. And there's a particular pathway called the NLRP3 in Flamazome, and there was a paper published in nature medicine I actually formulated the diet for Dr. Deep Dixit at Yale and that and he showed that it inhibited a specific inflammatory pathway That's kind of tightly associated with neural inflammation and traumatic brain. So that's that's just an example of one of the

Pathways independent of metabolism that could be, you know, and maybe that inflammation plays a role in epilepsy. We know that when guys get certain neuroinflammatory disorders, even a virus, you know, various viruses like even like herpes, simplex virus or shingles, some a couple people were emailing me when they get it, they were getting epilepsy or getting seizures and when they would get a breakout. And we know that that virus causes neural inflammation and we know that the key to zinc diet or ketones can suppress that.

So it may be working not only through metabolic based mechanisms, which most people are studying, but we're looking into the immune system and inflammation. Actually, a big part of Andrew Kutnik's research as a PhD student is to look at the immune system and the inflammatory markers that are associated with ketone supplementation. Is glucose metabolism or working with carbohydrates? Is that inherently inflammatory on its own and is removing that part of the process? I mean, that's a tough question to kind of a general thing to ask, but I'm wondering if how much of an effect comes from just the ketones themselves

and how much of an effect comes from possibly just the elimination of carbohydrates? That's a good question. So when you take a hit to the head or even if you have a neurological disorder, two things will impair glucose metabolism, including lower activity of pyruvate dehydrogenase complex or PTH complex. It's kind of like the gatekeeper to your metabolism. And with brain injuries, there's also

an internalization of the glucose transporter and neurons that would be the glut-3 transporter. So you have less transporter at the membrane, so the cells can't suck up glucose. And if they do suck up glucose, the rate limiting enzyme, PDH complex, is less active. So ketones can bypass that. They have a different transporter that can get the ketone across the membrane. And they go, they're metabolized into ATP. Our energy currency, completely independent of PDH complex.

So there's actually a disorder called pyruvate dehydrogenase complex deficiency syndrome. And the only therapy used clinically for kids that have this is the ketogenic diet. So and we know the prime cause of TBI brain energy impairment is a dysregulation of PDH and a dysregulation of the transporters at the membrane. They get internalized. They basically get sucked out of the membrane, so the glucose. So the ketones can then restore energy metabolism. So then am I being accurate by saying just kind of what you're saying? So basically

acute trauma reduces this PD PDH complex and the glute 3, did you say? The glute 3 trans, so acute trauma reduces those and if you don't bypass them, it's almost like you're starving. Yeah, and then you have excess glucose. I think maybe that was getting to the question. So you have a surplus of glucose in the cerebral spinal fluid, the CSF. Wow. And you're, you know, there's actually the acute insulin resistance to your body trauma.

And that can cause inflammation, something called advanced glycation end products or AEGs. And that can recap it and cause, or have it can cause a membrane lipid peroxidation. It can epigenetically suppress, you know, or trigger pro-inflammatory pathways. So when you, whenever you have a surplus of glucose floating around in your brain, in your body, that's going to trigger a cascade of inflammatory. Wow. So somebody gets hurt, they get injured. We need to hurry up and circumvent their normal energy pathway

because it's already messed up. And if we don't, we're gonna get more inflammation, potentially starve, brain cells, starve the body from being able to utilize energy. So you go ketogenic and it bypasses that in those particular circumstances. Are there other things because what I've noticed, this is all anecdot now, but I've been in fitness for a very long time, I've worked lots and lots of people and some people just seem to thrive on ketogenic type dieting and others

don't. It doesn't make a huge difference and I'm comparing healthy diet to healthy diet. I'm not comparing shitty diet to ketogenic diet, right? But some people seem to do phenomenal on it. Would that, is it safe to say that perhaps they have some of those disorders in regards to energy metabolism like you were talking about, but not on a smaller scale. But not from an acute injury, maybe their lifestyle

or maybe just they have some kind of genetic polymorphism. Yeah, that actually really could very well be the case. So some people are just less carbohydrate tolerant, so they're carbohydrate intolerant, so if they're keep feeding carbohydrates, they have a baseline elevation of high glucose, high insulin, and then they get on a ketogenic diet, and it restores them to basically normal health.

And some guys will start making ketones immediately. And we do have a very broad range of fatty acid oxidation enzyme activities. And there's like, for fat oxidation pathways, there's like 12 different enzymes, and you could have variations, different snips that will determine whether you're five times more higher activity of HNG, CoA liais or whatever, some kind of enzyme that either makes ketones or involved in fat oxidation. And we vary across the spectrum in that. And I think some of the technologies that are being developed, you take 23 and me data and you put it into some of these programs that are coming out like Neutertracker and other things will give you

insight and information into whether or not the Q&A diet may be for you. And I think that's kind of the future. We're not yet there with the technology, but I think we're, it's evolving into that direction where we may be able to predict the diet that may be optimal for us. And then we can kind of start it and maybe some simple physiological or biochemical biomarkers to track whether or not

we're adapting to that diet. Well, some people, like the diet just doesn't work for them and they keep trying it and they keep trying it. So it's time, yeah. And it's like if it's not working for you then, then you know, don't stop it. Yeah, I had somebody message me and they keep trying it and keep trying it. And it's like if it's not working for you, then you know, don't stop it. Yeah, I had somebody message me and they're like, yeah, I've been trying to keep it a giant diet. And I'm not pooping every day and I feel horrible.

And I'm like, how long have you been doing? Like 60 days and like, yeah, the problem should stop. Those weren't enough science for you or what? Well, we have to be very careful. I remember even after, so after we had you on the show, or was it before we would, Keto, Jind, we go before a dumb, I don't know, right around I remember even after, so after we had you on the show, or was it before we went keto genital? Do we go before or dumb?

I don't know, right around that time. It was either right before we had you right after, we all kind of said, hey, let's run the keto genital diet for a while and just kind of assess ourselves what we feel and notice and share with our audience. And we were very fascinated with it. It completely changed my relationship with fats, with carbohydrates, my diets.

I mean, I've been in fitness for over 15 years, and it's completely flipped it on its head for me. So it was huge for me. And we all kind of shared our stories. And man, after that, it became like, you know, keto-genic diet was like the mind pump diet. And we had to be like, back everybody up, like, listen, pump your brakes here.

You know, there's a lot of stuff we don't know. It's not for everybody. And these are just some of the things of the dots that we're connecting. stuff we don't know. It's not for everybody. These are just some of the things of the dots that we're connecting and we don't wanna come out and say, this is the official diet. In fact, none of us actually run a pure ketogenic diet

all the time. Like I said, it changed my relationship with fat and carbs. I feel like that's part of our responsibility is to continue to tell people that as good information is coming out, is because leave it up to all the morons out there They get a little bit of a science or a little bit of information and they fucking run with it You know and then create supplements around it and then try and promote the shit out of it and monetize it

So so I mean, I don't think it's to it's not debatable that the ketogenic diet has got real applications for particular situations, whether it be disease disorder, acute issues, but let's talk about the healthy average person. What are the potential benefits and detriment, or maybe detriment that can come from eating a ketogenic diet? Because most of our audience is just the average person

who's just sporkin working out once they get healthier. What kind of information can we give them in regards to eating this way? I would say the ketogenic diet, as it's defined clinically, if you look it up on Wikipedia, is not the kind of diet that you'd want to follow, unless you're attempting to metabolically manage some kind of disorder that's drug-resistant or not. Or the medical disorder. And the medical ketogenic diet,

what's the macro breakdown? It's like 70% fat or? It's like 90. It's, well, it's 85 to, it's a four to one ratio classical Johns Hopkins ketogenic diet is about 90% fat and about, yeah, like 8% protein. And that's, you know, for pediatric epilepsy. But as the diet evolved and the applications evolved,

Dr. Eric Kossoff, neurologist at Johns Hopkins, kind of has brought about the use of the modified actins, which I think is kind of what a lot of you guys are following, which is more liberal with protein. So you're, you can upwards of 20, typically 25, and even upwards of 30% protein, and the balance being fat. You know, now we understand, you know,

certain fats are better than others and to eliminate certain polyunsaturated plant-based fats and do monounsaturated fats are probably the ideal fat to have. And, and carbohydrates at, you know, five. And even in some cases, up to 10% I don't know if saturated fats are probably the ideal fat to have. Carbo hydrates at 5, and even in some cases up to 10% if they are of a certain fiber content can be added in. The modified Ackin's diet is probably the one that would be most applicable to the general audience.

I think as we age our carbohydrate tolerance decreases, as we age, and that needs to be recognized. And I think we could probably, you don't, and I was talking to Andrew about this, the other day, if I would go back to, you know, back when I was playing football in high school, if I did a abruptly change to a ketogenic diet, I think my performance would tank. And I probably would not be able to put on it and wait at all. But now that I'm in my 40s, I think a ketogenic diet, my body thrives on it. I mean, I could never go back to eating,

growing up in an Italian family and shoveling pasta in my mouth almost every night. And I did well on a ketogenic. I always stayed lean and my body, I had really high carbohydrate tolerance. My nieces and nephews are basically like, mainlining sugar and carbs all day. And it looked like little anatomy charts. And so they are obviously very carbohydrate tolerant and do really well.

But over the years, I find that my level of carbohydrate tolerance decreases with time. And I just feel better. And my energy is sustained longer. I don't have dips. I don't have shifts in my energy level. Is this something that they've seen in any type of study where they can find the show that that carbohydrate does they have a certain saturation point where now you start to get sort of diminishing returns going forward from that as far as what like as far as like is I'm on I'm eating a you'm eating carbohydrates like primarily and going through and I'm growing up eating

at ton of carbohydrates. This is a point where you said it's older. What makes that switch happen? I think it's largely dependent upon your activity level, obviously, but I think hormones too. Your insulin sensitivity when you're growing up through the teenage years, especially is just really high even through your early 20s and everything. So your body is much more responsive to like anabolic hormones.

So protein synthesis is just happening at a faster rate, you're repairing muscle tissue faster. So I think all those energy dependent processes are sensitive to glucose and insulin and you're more likely to have a better glucose disposal and insulin sensitivity when you're younger and growing and more active. And as we age and start sitting behind our desks and doing, you know, 90% of the day is basically an active, either we're sleeping or behind the desk and 10% we're active. That's kind of well, maybe the kids today are like that, but that's when I was growing up, I was pretty much half, you know,

more than half a day, I was just running around and stuff, working on a farm like constantly active. Do you think maybe that it's just a, just a chronic, like, you know, from, because I grew up on a time family too, it's like, I just ate carbohydrates all the time. And maybe after a while, my body's like, like, you know, from, because I grew up at a time in family too. It's like, I just ate carbohydrates all the time. And maybe after a while, my body's like, no, like it's enough, you know. And I think our mitochondrial capacity to decreases with time.

And it's inevitable. I mean, it's part of the aging process, right? But I think what's interesting about the ketogenic diet, when you force your body away from glycolysis away from sugar, it's forced to metabolize fats and ketones for energy. When you do that, it's well established that it's a stress initially, but your body, there's mitochondrial biosynthesis. You have more mitochondria over time and the efficiency of the mitochondria increases.

There's more mitochondria biogenesis. So these are real things that happen over time. It's been shown in animal models and athletes too. It's kind of the effect of exercise, but even independent of exercise, if you were to shift the macronutrient profile of the diet to higher in fats, you make more mitochondria. And that's, I consider that like, energy reserves. So by having more mitochondria, by forcing your mitochondria to work harder, the whorimetic response or whatever you want to, you have more metabolic flexibility.

You can go back to eating carbs and glucose. And then when you shift back to fats again, you have the mitochondria there that are responsible for bed oxidation of fats to make energy. So I think, you know, training your body to burn fat and ketones for energy and periodically, you know, using glucose under certain situations, I think, is would be ideal for the average person. That's where you're getting that. I think is would be ideal for the average person if that's where you're getting I think average person. Yeah, and I and I totally that's how I do it now and I had some autoimmune issues years ago and I found that eating more fats unless carbohydrates just made me feel better and I've gradually you know

moved towards a you know being in ketosis a lot of the times But I did find that I found out and in every once in a while, I would get boosts and performance in the gym and just all of a sudden I would get these great effects from the ketogenic diet again, like I had before. And from an evolutionary standpoint, it kind of makes sense, right? Like why would we have the ability to use both glucose

and ketones? Like it seems like we found, if we found fruit and we found tubers, we're going to eat the hell out of them. And if we didn't, then we just ate the meat that was around us. So, would you say that's beneficial to go back on forth? And yeah. Okay. Our body knows what to do. I think there's a lot of confusion out there that if you do eat this way and then go back, you know, you'll have insulin resistance or whatever. But I think it's kind of good to stay for the average person unless you're managing like some kind of disorder to switch in and out.

And yeah, I think we're designed to do that. And I think our bodies kind of work better when there's relative changes. Like, and I think it's better to adapt in that way where much more mental, mostly flex. So when you look at the younger generation coming up as a whole, right? And I know everyone's individualized here, but if as a whole, what's the advice you give to someone like that as far as, you know, maybe the eating habits that they're creating,

you know, in their teens and to one in 20 years old? What do you see is a problem or that could become a problem for them? And how would you advise somebody in that age group that what would you say? Saying for like the... Like just saying generally, yeah. Well, yeah, because we know like,

I mean obesity is on the rise. We have more information out there, right? We have the science is better, but yet we're, this is... We're just fatter and stuff. Yeah, we're getting more. So that to me, I feel like, okay, well, then what's going on here? Does it make sense to me?

So someone with that's a scientist like you that does a lot of research and understands effective carbohydrates and fats and the benefits of ketogenic diet, you know, and if you were advising a younger person that's coming up and, you know, eating Captain Crunch for breakfast and then pop tart before he does his workout and then smash in his protein bar. I mean, this is kind of like his day, which was a lot of how I ate growing up. What would you say to someone like that? Well, I would look at what they're doing and kind of say, how's that working for you? And then analyzing what they're doing and to bring them back, I mean, we just put in

a grant in El Paso because there's a big problem there with the community, the kids, and the adult population, obesity is skyrocketing. And it's kind of like, it's very hard to get like whole foods and packaged foods and sugary drinks are just off the charts there So it represents a really big problem. So you'd have to look at The people and actually look specifically at what they're doing what they're putting into their bodies and activity levels It's multi-factorial, but a lot of it has to do Many people kind of note well not always know what to do, but it's their relationship

It's their psychological relationship with food. Like they may not necessarily need a nutritionist. They may need like a nutritional psychotherapist. Like they need to change their relationship that they have with their food because they are going to, you know, their go-to comfort foods are the things that they gravitate towards. Could it reward you later on?

Do you think it's purely psychological or do you think that some of these foods have addictive properties to them too? The physiological changes and the neuropharmacology of the brain literally changes in ways that make us psychologically dependent upon foods and even generally speaking macronutrient ratios of foods, like, you know,

so it's both. So you could say it's engineered somewhat, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, come on, you know how much money this is massive. I'm gonna miss that though. This was a little area that we didn't see quite eye to eye with Lane, I know we're all good friends with Lane

and Sal loves the jab at him in this area. We all are a little group. To poke the bear. I talked to Lane about this a lot. Yeah, yeah. What, tell me what your thoughts on this? Well, there's no doubt, and I think lean will even agree that so my perspective is when it comes to, you know, and the big thing is kind of weight loss and body composition

changes, you know, getting leaner, and that comes down to being able to control the psychology of your food. And that comes down to appetite and being satiated. And I think Lane will even agree, and many coaches out there need to look at the data and we'll agree that if you're following a diet that causes less post-prandial excursions in glucose and insulin, it's going to change your appetite. This is a problem if we're calorie restricting for any period of time. Is a result of a hypoglycemic event. If we have normal blood glucose and do not dip into hypoglycemic zones, we're not going to have these cravings that really send us over the edge. I think you could do that with, if it fits your macros, metabolic...

You don't feel like that's flirting with it though? You can do that, but some people can do that if you have willpower, but the ketogenic diet or just, you don't even have to be ketogenic, just, you know, carbohydrate restriction, you know, low carbs, moderate fat, even in high protein diet would work, because protein has a satiating effect too. But the carbohydrate restriction component seems to be really important, at least initially, to kind of fix people's metabolism, and then they can titrate carbs back in depending on their goals or what they want to do.

But that's the culprit, and it's controlling appetite. And there seems to be some differences between, even between ethnicities, there's some like polymorphisms like Native Americans and Hispanics, for example, seem to have much, well, they do statistically much higher rates of things like diabetes and insulin resistance eating the same Western diet and, you know, that the rest of Americans do. Do you guys ever look into that because I'm you know, there's some theories right that maybe the Native Americans were hunter-gatherers for longer And they weren't into you know, they didn't go through the agricultural illusion like we did and so you know Their bodies don't respond the same and they're the population really the group those working with that we put in Yeah, yeah they You know, it's such a challenge for these people, the families and the kids, too. It becomes such a stress for them to count their calories.

We talk about flexible dieting, but if you're flexible dieting and eating the same foods and you're hungry all the time, so the good thing about carbohydrate restriction and the Q&A diet, you lose weight inadvertently. You're not even trying to do it. It normalizes your appetite and you become satiated to the point where your brain auto-regulates and you eat according to your body's needs or your energy levels. Whereas if you're spiking glucose a couple times a day, even with a perfect flexible dieting macronutri nutrient ratio, you're still

spiking glucose more if it's a carbohydrate-based diet, and you're getting these post-prandial dips in glucose that's triggering hunger. And in that population that you just mentioned, that are classically insulin resistant for a variety of reasons, mostly genetically at some point, but there's some kind of behavioral things to there. It just makes sense to use a super, or you can create a flexible dieting scenario where you have a toolbox of different approaches that you could do and just do a flexible dieting scenario

with a low carb or a t-jank. And I know Lane is very interested in doing that too. And the guys who practice this are becoming more interested in it because they're reaching out and contacting me. In fact, you know, when you say that, I could tell you right now trying to gain weight eating ketogenic is much more difficult to do. And in fact, one of the reasons why I go out of it sometimes is that I'll just keep losing weight.

And is that primarily, is it just the appetite suppression? Or is there also another fat burning or weight loss thing that's going on there that's causing your body to want to lose weight? I know that's a million dollar question, right? Yeah. I think, you know, I've probably lost a good 20 pounds since I've been doing this.

But then again, my work has become, you know, much more intense. I spend long days in the lab and I generally eat two meals instead of trying to force feed six or eight per day. But I have, it's been really amazing the amount of muscle and strength I can maintain doing hardly any, like getting to hardly getting to the gym at all or eating very minimal. So when it comes to losing,

you know, with the ketogenic diet, if you are losing weight, the thing to do is to increase your protein and keep kind of your carb fat ratio the same or actually just start putting in, titrating in more protein and in and around your workouts, I think can help a lot around the days, you know, that I always say about the 12 hours after your workout is when you really want to drive protein synthesis. Okay. Let's talk about exogenous ketones because I know you're like deep in that in that particular realm of this. What are you guys looking at right now with exogenous ketones? What are the

applications for taking just the ketone supplement? Yeah. The original application was was pretty, I guess, so terrible. I guess you would say it would, it was for CNS oxygen toxicity seizures. And that's a limitation of Navy SEAL divers or special operations divers or even recreational divers that use a closed circuit rebreather. What was the, you gave a number, I think, I heard you talk about what's the, how many of those guys would experience that before you started doing this research? It ver, well, the problem is if they do report it, they kind of get in trouble and they may, they may pull them. So it's grossly under reported.

So what I've, you know, done is kind of connect with the re-breather diving community, these tech divers that are using the closed-circuit re-breeder diving community, these tech divers that are using the closed-circuit re-breethers, and they say it's happening all the time. You know, they're getting like, you know, eye twitches or kind of weird auras and have to get surfaced quick or even on the fly, change their get breathing gas mixtures. It varies. You can prevent it pretty easily actually if you just dive within the limits of your and the Navy has certain limits as far as how deep you are.

At just 50 feet of seawater, you can get a seizure in 10 minutes, and that's not. But with these rebreaters at the seals used, they just typically have to stay very shallow just to stay out of, and there's no bubbles so you can sneak up on guys and shoot them. And that's the idea. But sometimes if you're taking fire from a 50 caliber gun or you got to go down and put a mine on a ship, or you know, there was a dozen different scenarios, guys would tell me about, or they would just have to,

because the enemies there, they have to stay under longer. They can't surface. So if you're your dive computer, the table say, hey, you got to go up, but the enemy is there with a gun, you know, you got to stay down. So in those situations, that can be fatal to the mission and fail to the guy, too, right? Because a seizure underwater is... So oxygen toxicity seizures in and of themselves are not detrimental if you're in a hyperbac chamber, you know, because as soon as you lower the partial pressure of oxygen by just putting an air in place of 100% oxygen, you knock right out of the seizure. So if you're diving, all that means you just need to surface up. So it's very under-reported to answer your question.

And it's being studied now. We studied it in rats and showed that you could feed rats a high carbohydrate diet and give them a ketone ester. And it would increase their latency to seizure 575%. Instead of seizing in 10 minutes, you could go over an hour at 132 feet of seawater, which is five atmospheres.

And so we started studying that, and now we're looking into, now you have something, it's not an anti-epileptic drug, which would make your thinking foggy and slow you down physically, but it's an energy molecule that you can consume that protects your brain in that environment. And it's also feeding your body a source of energy that can potentially enhance performance. So as you know, the cycling community is all over this. And we're doing experiments and rats. We put them on a treadmill like the vice, like a rhodorod. And when we get the dosage and the formula right, they can run faster and longer.

And it just becomes another fuel, like creatin in regards to intense strength training. It's ketones are like the next creatin for, I agree. You know, a range of different things. I actually, after we talked to, I actually bought some online and I noticed mainly it was an endurance boost. I just work out and work out and work out and I felt like I could keep going.

So that works for people who eat carbohydrates. So if I'm eating a regular diet, I could take exogenous ketones and go cycle and I'm going to notice what they're showing is that you're getting a boost in endurance. So you don't need to be on a ketogenic diet to notice that. Well, that studies that we need to do, right? So the animal work supports that. And the anecdote supports a lot of friends that do it that way. Yeah, there's the elite level cyclist, you know, that will are experimenting

with this stuff. And there's a few couple publications that are out looking at it. And, you know, pretty high impact journals like Selma Tabletism that show kind of an increase in time to exhaustion and things like that. It needs to be further explored as to what is the, and there's dozens of different types of ketones supplements out there, which make it even more interesting

because I think the real benefits come in formulating something that's not just ketones, but ketones and other energy metabolites and cofactors that make those energy metabolites be able to be utilized more efficiently in the cells. Interesting. So that's, we're really excited about formulating things. Yeah, because right now on the market,

I think the one I got was, I was just beta hydroxybutyrate, right? Just in salt. Yeah. Yeah. This is salt. And in the studies you guys are using something else? Well, we use you can make you can combine beta hydroxybutyrate to many different molecules, you know, and call it a salt if it's combined with sodium. It's a sodium. That's the thing that I used to. And you could combine it with potassium magnesium, any monovalant or divalent cation or even amino acids. So that really, and if you spread the beta hydroxybutyrate across many different electrolytes or minerals

and even amino acids, that allows you to be able to take in more of it. Because if you just make a sodium one, you're getting a bit of a sodium overload or if you make a magnesium one, That becomes a governing factor. Crap it out. Oh, wow. Yeah, so that's exciting. Formulated, you know, the key to ranked diet makes you deficient in some things like potassium for example and even magnesium.

I was deficient in magnesium until I started supplementing and I felt much better at eating cramps and some of the supplements on the market are combining beta hydroxybutyrate with magnesium and that shot my magnesium levels up really well. And the top end of the normal where I was in the bottom end of normal. And the magnesium supplements on the market are kind of pricey and the ones that are cheap like magnesium oxide didn't do anything to my magnesium level. Oh, so you were actually testing your blood to see if it... Yeah, I tested my minerals and things like that.

So, you could formulate a ketone supplement that would be a great supplement to the ketogenic diet if you're a low carb diet. So if you're doing a low carb diet, but not hitting ketone levels to a point where they would be kind of ergotogenic in a way. You can supplement with ketones and still get the benefit of low carb diet and ketone supplement. I'm also reading a lot of people online talking about a neutropic effect from supplementing with,

well, okay, so it's been around for a long time now where you hear people saying, oh my God, I started eating ketogenic and I can think clear, I feel sharper, so you've got all these brain hackers who we do think it's like that. It's from the ket these brain hackers who we do to get the ex-fron the ketones. The ketones, you think it's because of the suppressing the carbohydrates. Which one do you think it's?

Yeah, that's a good point. So if you're putting in energy or calories in the form of ketones, people need to recognize that if they're consuming these ketones supplements, it is a source of calories. Even though the FDA doesn't really have it, it's not in the food label. It doesn't say it.

You know, when you buy them, you're like, oh, there's no calories in that. Yeah, yeah. And I think marketers try to play that up. But yeah, you are consuming calories, and you'd be, your appetite might go down because you're consuming, you know, calories, right? Your body has kind of energy sensors.

So the neurological effects could be due to a number of different factors. Like I said, Stephen Cunain in Canada, he does a dual PET scan. I talked about a glucose PET scan, an FDG PET scan. Well, he does a ketone PET scan. So you can image the brain and the fluorescent intensity of the signal reflects brain ketone utilization. And he can do a glucose and a ketone pet scan and

show that the brain can use both fuels very efficiently. As we age, we have impaired glucose metabolism as we age, but that's not the case for ketones. So our ability to use ketones as brain fuel does not change as we age as it does with glucose. So I think the people that may be benefit from this most are the age population or people with some kind of impairment or the special operations community. Or if we're, so a lot of what I do is studying the physiology and the neuroscience of extreme environments, whether that be like altitude or space

or the hyperbaric environment. In that case, ketones shine. They seem to shine because they can suppress oxidative stress and they preserve brain energy, metabolism and function even in the face of an oxidative challenge or an extreme environment. But when it comes to a normal healthy person, I think that the jury's still out as to whether it's beneficial. There's anecdotal reports out there,

and I can even say myself, I noticed it if I'm a little bit hungry during the middle of the day, there's something I fasted quite a bit and I take ketones supplements without a doubt. I mean, my energy I'm more focused, I can kind of work more productive. So it may just be that their brains weren't just working very well,

and with glucose. And so now on the ketogenic diet, it works well. They've got good energy. And they feel a boost, but not necessarily because it's a boost on its own. And there's other, you know, as a scientist, I have to critique even these anecdotal reports and even myself. So if I was to give an equal amount of sodium and fluids, and it increases my blood volume. I get better circulation to the brain and even a little boost to my sympathetic nervous system when you get a little bit of sodium and fluids in you. Then that could be stimulating. You have to tease out all these effects.

I'm glad you said that because this is the thing that always worries me. What I'm hearing us talk about this right now is we get this little bit of science and good information that we're learning. Now all of a sudden the market takes it and I can argue or I could pitch that if this supplement it could help increase stamina and endurance type of that, it could help you build muscle because now you could go longer and go harder and increase volume. So now I can sell it as like a muscle building supplement or even possibly a fat burning supplement. When really it's like splitting hairs on how much

it's really beneficial, especially if all the other shit in your life's all fucked up. Like you're not drinking enough water, your sodium's off, your macros are all fucked up. But now you're buying this $50 supplement because you think it's gonna help you burn fat or build muscle. Yeah, yeah.

So that's why we really need to studies and we harp on that all the time. In regards to building muscle, there is some data to show that ketones can be anabolic in some ways. Oh, that's a big one. Yeah. What is it showing? What is the saying showing? Well, it depends. There was a study in humans actually where they gave like IV ketones and looked at

loose-seam metabolism and protein synthesis and showed that it went up in the presence of an IV administration of sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate. And there was a couple studies in animal models, one in an animal model of muscular dystrophy that showed that acetyl acetate, which breaks down from beta hydroxybutyrate, and we can also, we develop forms of acetoacetate. And we think it's important to get a ratio of acetoacetate to beta hydroxybutyrate in the blood, to get optimal effects. That acetoacetate can mitigate the muscle loss and even aid in muscle regeneration, in

particular disease models. And it was some preliminary reports on animal models showing that. So that's something that we want to study. Actually, Andrew Kutnik, the PhD student in the lab, is focusing on mitigating cancer, muscle wasting called cancer cacaxia. And we are developing a mitigation strategy to prevent that. And from an evolutionary perspective, if we're fasting, our body will shift over from using glucose to fatty acids and ketones for fuel. The brain does not readily get long-chain fatty acids as a source of energy. So if we didn't

make ketones, we would catabolize, we would break down a lot of the gluconeogenic amino acids from our body, namely our skeletal muscle, right? Because that's the biggest source of it. So we would start chopping up all these amino acids to main body has very, very powerful homeostatic mechanisms to main blood glucose. So it will chew up all your muscle to keep blood glucose, to send energy to the brain. What prevents that is the formation of ketones in the liver. So if the ketones are elevated in the blood, then they become extremely anti-cadabalic. And that's the evolutionary, you know,

one of the main purposes is to supply, your brain is like 3% of your body weight, but it sucks up 20 to, in some cases, 25 and 30% of your energy. So it's a massive energy sink, and your body will do everything in its power to prevent it from being energy deprived. So if you have ketones elevated,

that's a tremendous buffer from catabolizing amino acids from your muscle. So they're very anti-catabolic in that sense. Well, so let's talk about current research right now. What are you able to talk about what you're working on now? Because I know a lot of the stuff you do in the past, you've worked with the military, with the Navy SEAL. I'd love to talk about what you're doing with NASA. Yeah, yeah. Can you go on to some of that? Yeah, so we have, I would say, you know, a half dozen or more different kind of like active projects.

The big one that kicked everything off was oxygen toxicity seizures. toxicity seizures. And that was done in a Sprag-Dolly rat model where we just gave ketone esters and looked at the effects of mitigating oxygen toxicity seizures. And that work has recently translated to projects that were writing up and working on getting funding for, projects that were writing up and working on getting funding for, because the agency supports it's Office of Navy Research and NAVC, it's part of the Department of Defense, to do an analogous study in humans where they are in a hyperbaric chamber and they are exercising at a level of hyperbaric oxygen that would be equivalent to various missions using a closed circuit re-brither and looking at oxygen toxicity and actually taking these guys to seizures. Or they actually have physiological biomarkers with that they can detect that are early indicators

that you're going to have a seizure. Interesting. And then they can predict it. Like, okay, this guy's about to have a seizure. Yeah, so they focus on that, but they also have guys, so they're underwater sort of exercising, but with their head above water to catch them, so they don't get. So these are experiments that are kind of being, are in the process now of getting funding,

and we'll be doing it at Duke University in collaboration with our lab. So it's a translation of our preclinical animal work to the human populations, which we've been working for, working on. And some of the more potent ketones supplements are not yet FDA approved. So we actually, we're going to use the ketogenic diet

because when I first got into this, there was such a stigma on the ketogenic diet, killing athletic performance that the Navy didn't even want to touch it. But now, as some of the data is emerging, it's showing that, well, it may not be so detrimental to performance, it actually may be helpful. So they kind of warmed up to the idea of using a modified Actins diet to produce ketone in addition to some of commercially available ketone supplements that can be formulated and to put these guys on and to do this study. So oxygen toxicity is one and also exercise performance.

So warfighter performance is a big one. And that's our program officer is actually the program officer for undersea medicine and also warfighter performance is a big one. And that's our program officer, is actually the program officer for undersea medicine and also warfighter performance. So he's interested in, basically finding out what's the optimal ketone supplement, what's the optimal nutritional ketosis state that can optimize performance under a range of environmental extremes, whether it be hypoxia to hypoxia to even

hypothermia or hypothermia, has been a topic of one of the recent meetings. Yeah, is there any benefit to eating ketogenic when you're in those extreme temperatures? Well, some of the animal data suggests that when your body is adapted to a ketogenic diet, you may have some better thermo tolerance and under both extremes. Interesting. But it has not been tested experimentally yet in like, it controlled trials in humans.

So these are things that we're moving towards. Is there any anecdotal out there or any chatter? Because I think there's a lot of these extreme athletes that are doing these like cold dips and cold and hot contrasts. Is anybody saying like, hey, ketogenic time helps me with that? I haven't paid attention, so I don't know. So I'm just curious. Yeah, there's, you do get a thermogenic effect

from certain types of fatty acids, even medium chain triglycerides can stimulate thermogenesis in some ways. But nothing really robust. It's all like a very little effect. We just had a meeting on hypothermia and how to mitigate it. And kind of the best things out there from the literature was like caffeine, a fedron, like caffeine, a fedron, a stack, yeah, it was like. As a constrictor? Yeah, and just stimulating metabolism. Can I have a chromin production? Yeah, and just internal oxygen consumption.

But if you, when you're stimulating metabolism, it's a double edge swords because you are consuming more oxygen too. So you increase oxygen consumption, which is not a great thing in some situations, and central nervous system stimulants can make you more susceptible to CNS oxygen toxicity. Oh, I don't know that. Yeah, like if you take a big hit of a stimulant, right? Well, we did a study that was funded

by Divers Alert Network using pseudo-affedron, a redeemic affedron, Reseamic affedron. And the dose had to be high, but if the dose was, if you downed about four or five times, the recommended dose and you went diving, you could have a seizure faster within. But, and people do abuse, you know, affedron in that way.

And divers, the worst thing for a diver is to have sinus congestion and you want your eustachian tubes and your sinusoidal. They must use pseudo-affedron. They're not crazy. Yeah, when we went, so I'm a diver and when we would be diving, everybody would hand around their package of pseudo-affedron and people would pop pseudo-affedron before getting in the water because you could pop your eardrum your ear drums if your ear station tubes are clocked. So it's very common to take these de-conjustance when you dive and they are seeing a stimulants, you know, like a fedron. It's a pretty

powerful stimulant. So if you take pseudo-affedron and you're going diving, it's probably a good idea to be on a ketogenic diet or take some ketones and offset that whole situation. So something pops up in my head when we talk about supplementing with ketones and exogenous ketones. Do we see individual variances when people go on ketogenic diets in terms of the types and amounts of ketones that they're producing? Because there's a lot, there's different ketones

that people run off of, right? And I would imagine that one of the difficulties in creating a supplement would be to kind of hit what the body would naturally produce or what the, you know, because you've got Betty, Hydroxyputarate and you've got some other stuff going on. What, what, what, do we see individual variances where this person's ketone, but we see higher levels of these ketones and, you know, this is going on with him and this person over here is a little different or is it more general? Yeah, so the answer to the question yeah there is big variation so I guess the important thing from a practical perspective is how do we use different tools to figure out you know if we

are making ketones well or how to optimize it for us personally. And I think that's what we're really interested in doing that. And we also know that the body has about a dozen different ketogenic enzymes, you know, one is thylase and one is HMG-CoA-Lyase. And these enzyme activities vary in different people and will be very important for their adaptation to a ketogenic diet and in some ways you can upregulate the enzymes over time But I think the best indicators kind of like your performance and how you feel but

also the measurement of urine ketones which would be a pseudo-acetate or blood beta hydroxybuty, which can be measured by a commercial meter and Abbots lab precision extra or or neo. And if you are just feeling typically if you feel good on a ketogenic diet, I would basically just stop what I'm doing if I felt really good and then check my ketones and I consistently instead of checking my ketones and trying to like, you know, saying, okay, I feel good because my ketones, and I consistently, instead of checking my ketones and trying to, you know, saying, okay, I feel good because my ketones are high. I would kind of stop when I felt most energetic and most elucid, and I consistently got a certain ketone range. And I would tell people to do the same thing.

Follow ketogenic diet, and if you feel like crap, well, measure your glucose and ketones at that point in time, and that's probably areas where you don't want to be in, whereas when you feel most energetic, have the best stamina, try to get a metabolic snapshot of what that is, and try to figure out what you did and how to achieve that state. And there's biomarkers that made you achieve

that physiological psychological state. Now, I know for a lot of people, when they reduce carbohydrates and bump on fats, and even if they do ketogenic or modified ketone, you tend to see the literature at least shows that you see lots of improvements in blood markers like cholesterol and triglycerides and better insulin sensitivity. However, there are cases where you'll put people on a ketogenic eye and their lipids just go crazy and it just doesn't look good. Why is that?

These people obviously should not eat a higher fat diet or is it the type of fats that they're eating that they may need to change? Well, I had that too. I got an NMR lipid profile which looked at everything and my LDL P was elevated, my LDL was elevated, so really high. And that's not the case anymore. But when I did that test, I was eating about 60% of my fat intake was dairy fat. And over the course, now maybe about 10 or 15% is dairy fat. And I was just showing Andrew my numbers yesterday.

My total cholesterol, it was 300 and now it's 180. And my triglycerides are like 50 or 60 or something like that. And just by dropping down the dairy. Did dairy fat and adding more monolensaturated fats so the composition of the fat and plays a big role and also maybe adaptation too. So I purposely, I did that pricey lipid profile test, which my insurance didn't cover, so I took a big hit to my part of it. So like $1,500 test. Is this the moment I look at like the size of the LDL particles?

Yeah, and there was like lots of red flags there. Really? And I followed it for, you know, I consistently ate what I, the experiment was eating my keto mousse, which was like basically a quart of sour cream a day. So I was getting like 250 grams of fat. Sounds fucking awesome. It is, you know, and my weight didn't even really go up that much. But, which is interesting, because I am really go up that much, but which is interesting, because I am a good fat oxidizer,

but no other biomarker, or would I consider a biomarker of general health, was elevated. My C-reactive protein was like 0.1 in a range. So everything else was great. Everything, my triglycerides were even pretty good. They bumped up a little bit to maybe 65 or 70, but on a general scale that that was really good.

My glucose was good. Every other, my blood pressure, like all other things that I think are most important biomarkers of health were excellent. So what, you know, and I talked to the experts that are leading lipidologists on this. And they said, oh yeah, that's, you know, and I talked to the experts that are leading lipidologists on this. And they said, oh yeah, that's, you know, that's, these are numbers that you want to bring down.

But then I question them, everything that we know about, you know, LDL and LDL, you know, little particle size and thing like, we understand it in the context of a regular diet. We do not understand what these numbers mean in the context of acetogenic diet. Wow, that's a great point. Radically different than the eating pattern of a normal diet. Because that same number could be horrible. What do they say to you when you say that? Do they do they respond? What do they respond to you? They say that's a that's a really good point and and they say, you know, well, you have to ask the question of why, why is it elevated? And I think, you know, the LDL particle

are like little boats that carry around cholesterol and even triglycerides. And if you're eating, if you're pounding tons of fat, what you do, you know, on especially classical usually, you're gonna need more little boats in there to carry around the fat. So I think it's the body's way to just upregulate a transport mechanism for fat and cholesterol and things that you're eating.

So, and I think there's more, maybe turnover too. I think your adipose tissue kind of opens up where you have more fats coming in and being stored, but you have more fats going out and being, so there's just like more rapid turnover of triglyceride in the adipose and probably in the liver and other intraorgan kind of movement of fatty acids too as you adapt to it. So I think that's the reason, but we don't know. I mean, classically though, those markers are correlated with-

And that's why you change your diet, because you're like, well, we don't know, but I wanna make sure. Yep, yep, we don't know. And I want to make sure. Yep, yep, we don't know. And I basically, I'm trying to figure out, you know, what is, people ask like, what should my fat ratio be? If you were to, you know, take a biopsy of someone

at a pose and look at the primary fat, which is in the at a pose, it would be monoinsaturated fat. So I think from a very simplistic point of view, it would make sense to kind of eat the types of fats that our body prefers to store as an energy source for use of energy source. So a lot of people think like a steak

is like pure saturated fat, but if you look at a steak, it's mostly monolensaturated fat. Especially if it's grass fat, you see a different, a little bit of a different fatty as a robot. Yup, that changes it too. And I actually was talking to this a few years ago with Donald Layman, who is a,

or Lay Norton's PhD advisor on fatty acid composition of different protein sources. And he was like, his impression that a steak is actually perfect, you know, kind of a fat source. Oh yeah. I love this. You just made my day. Yeah, the talk was basically about,

and this was, goes back years ago, about the demonization of saturated fat and what types of fats would be ideal for the diet. Well, I also think it's interesting that when you look at cholesterol numbers, very, very high cholesterol is correlated with early death, but it's also correlated with longevity. Some of the long, like the oldest people. How worthless are the basic cholesterol studies?

I mean, a test that a doctor gives you nowadays. Is it worthless now? From what we know now. Yeah, I definitely, I mean, it's much more important to focus on your triglycerides. If your triglycerides are elevated, that basically means that your fat metabolism sucks. So if you have all these fats floating around, they have the potential to be oxidized and recabic on different things. But I think your triglyceride number, that tells a story.

And the fastest way to lower your triglycerides is to eliminate or reduce carbohydrate. Because if you have sugar and glucose in your blood, and your body's not gonna suck up the triglycerides and use that for fuel if it has glucose, so there's the kind of a competition there. So if you lower glucose that forces your body to dispose of essentially the triglycerides

that are floating around in your system and to oxidize those as fuel. I always found it fascinating with cholesterol. There was a little stint there where I did a lot of research and reading myself on the internet. And it was crazy because I found people who had relatively or by current standards high cholesterol, so over the over 200, that's like the people who are like the centarians they all tend to have this kind of higher cholesterol or at least those that do get less infections or stronger have more mobility. And then LDL, although high LDL was was connected to heart disease, it was also connected to a stronger immune system like people didn't get infections

to a stronger immune system, like people didn't get infections as often with high deal, and people don't realize that low cholesterol, like really no low numbers, are strongly connected to mental issues like depression. Yeah, you know, so it's an interesting thing. All calls mortality. All calls, but yeah. So, yeah, cholesterol is an essential building block. Your brain is like a big chunk of cholesterol, fat and cholesterol and phospholipid. So it would make sense that it would make real sense

that if you're deficient in cholesterol, that could be a very serious thing. And when it's high, I'm not convinced that that's a bad thing if you're LDL's high. It's good to have your HDL elevated to pretty, I'm pretty convinced that low HDL can contribute to hard attacks, just seeing some of the numbers out there. There's various things like anabolic can really push your HDL down into like even the single digits sometimes. So I think it's really

important to keep your healthy HDL level to like 60, 70, 80, even 100. So who are the kind of people that you would say, you could say right now that probably shouldn't eat a ketogenic type diet? Are there any, is there any kinds of people that you'd say, okay, look, I don't think I'd recommend this to you. Or is it more of a try at first and then determine? I would say all kids and teens and maybe even early 20s that don't have a problem, you know,

are not overtly obese or insulin resistant could probably do fine. Just on a higher carbohydrate diet. But I think, you know, generally people who feel like they have a preoccupation with food too, and they have to eat a lot, and they're always hungry, so I have people who come up to me and say, I gotta eat all the time. And it's kind of liberating to eat a diet that's higher in fat and protein and not be hungry all the time. So if that's something that I think appeals to them,

then which should appeal to people who don't wanna be kind of hungry all the time. I think they should at least give it a try. So, Dom, I wanna pivot a little bit because if I let Sal, we will talk about studies for four hours here for a minute. And I always like to give our audience a little more of your personal background and maybe your business mind and sense.

And, you know, tell me, I have no idea like, how does a scientist get paid? How do you make a living being a scientist? Because I feel like there's not a lot of ways you guys, how do you guys do that? It's not even monetized. Yeah, it's not, it's not even monetized. Yeah. So we get a monestallery, you know, as know as an educator well I guess I'll take it step back. So as a PhD student well I'm extremely fortunate the last you know two PhD students in my lab Nathan Ward and

Andrew Kootnick are presidential fellows from our university which is a very prestigious award that you get, you know, as a fellow and basically you have a full ride. So, and that as a principal investigator running a lab, the biggest hit to your budget is actually when you take on a PhD student to do research in the lab, and they really are kind of steering the wheel. They're in the trenches. You have to pay their stipend, which is like $25 to $27,000 a year. You have to pay their tuition, you have to pay their health insurance. It ends up being like 40, you know, 45,000 in the business world. That's not much. But to a scientist who've you had multiple students, that ends up being a lot. So we have to get that money from federal grants or if we're lucky enough grants from industry.

So as a student, I was funded from a fellowship too, but it was a fellowship through not a presidential fellowship, but one through my advisor. And it's a very modest income just enough to live on, basically, like 25, 30,000. And then as a postdoc, you get bumped up to maybe after you finish kind of like analogous to a residency, if you do your MD, you're getting paid maybe about 40 to 45,000. And that money, you start after your PhD, you work as a postdoctoral fellow.

And that period is your period to shine and to establish yourself as an independent investigator. So you pick a project and you just keep writing grants and writing grants until you get funding to fund your own salary. And it's kind of, sounds daunting. 12, 16 hour days of research,

not only in the lab, are you doing research and running your own experiments, but you are, your PI typically has a little bit of money to get own experiments, but you are your PI typically has a little bit of money to get you started, but basically says, you know, go do the research and write grants to get your own funding, because I don't want to keep having to fund you, you know, all the time. And if you move on and then get, you know, I was lucky enough to get funding through the Office of Navy Research to do it. I had submitted grants to many different agencies, American Long Association, American Heart Association,

even NIH, and they all got rejected. But then I wrote a proposal to do something that was really high-risk, but high-reward. And it was to develop hyperbaric atomic force microscopy, which is a type of microscopy that allows you to zoom in on cells and get ultra high resolution scans, like in an electron microscope, but you could do it on living tissue. And it was kind of like an out of the box, and we were going to take this technology, and instead in using it on silicon valley applications, like materials, we were going to like image living cells with it. And then not only that, we're going to take this technology and stick it inside a hyperbark chamber that could simulate all sorts of environmental conditions,

whether it be the top of a mountain or the undersea environment. Now are you watching the cells real time with this? Yeah. So you can you can image cells real time, the tip with an atomic force microscope, the tip actually interacts with the sample. So you can like functionalize the tip, you can push in on the membrane and do... See what's going on. ...membring fiscal elastic changes. So with my post-doctoral fellowship, I just, I tended, I did something.

I got funding to do a pretty novel project and that was a stepping stone to other grants and to work with other investigators who wanted to use this kind of technology. And then, you know, working with the Office of Navy Research because they funded the project, they're more likely to fund you to use the tool that you developed. You know, so that led to another larger grant, which led to a larger grant, and then I moved from a postdoc to what's called a research assistant professor, but on soft money, which means the university was not paying me. I was paying all my salary and paying even the people under me and paying for all my experiments.

Yeah, so completely soft money. And then it sounds like a pain in the ass, dude. Yeah, you're always like on edge because if you lose your funding, and they like kick you out. So nobody goes into this to become rich basically. You've been in the game for a long time, you can't, your salary set,

like you, you know, the school basically says, well, you can pay yourself that amount. And it, like you, you know, the school basically says, well, you can pay yourself that amount and it's just enough, you know, you can't, you really get supplemental income. But then I transitioned into what was called a tenure track position. And you get five years to be, and in that five years, if you do, if you publish X amount of papers, if you pull in X amount of research dollars typically in the millions they want. If you teach X amount of classes and serve on, you know, X amount of committees, you know, service to, and there's this metric that you have to hit. And if you hit all that within a five-year time frame and that time frame does seem very compressed, what all you get, you can get promoted to tenure. And I recently got that like last year. So in that tenure, what that tenure does is they basically, the school covers your salary

up to 50 to 70% of your salary and then you have to pay the rest of it through grants, but it secures your position at the school where you have to do something illegal for them to like fire you or something completely out of line. So that's like a big, that's like kind of the thing that people going in academia, the scientists try to do. They try to get into a tenure track position and hope that all goes well. And then when you come up for tenure, you have to submit this huge packet of information that are committee who evaluate you. No joke, man.

How many times is any of this intellectual property that you can keep for yourself or do you have to give this away to the people giving you grants? That's a really good question. Depending on the agency that's funding you, if it's a company or an industry, the contract may say in the contract that they have all the rights to the intellectual property. And the Department of Defense, surprisingly, kind of gives up all the intellectual property to the university. So I can be an inventor, which we do have a number of patents, like almost up to 10 patents now, and not all of them are licensed, just some of them are.

But the school essentially owns that intellectual property. You are an inventor on it, and then they have their technology transfer team, works with all the interested parties, and they basically negotiate, you know, who's going to get the license for what kind of application is very different. You know, different if it's going to be a medical application, a military application, or like a general use. Yeah, general pop, you know, kind of use. Just doing stuff like this, help, like getting on podcasts, and because you've been on the circuit now,

I've heard you talk, I've seen you talk on YouTube, Ted Talks, and you know, you're going a lot of podcasts. Does that help to do that kind of stuff to be able to get, you know, because now you're known, like, is that more likely to get you more funding? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that's good. I thank you guys for giving me this platform

and with all the reach that you have, it helps tremendously. And all the, you know, the different podcasts that we did, I think the, you know, the first one goes way back to like, Mccola, who's kind of controversial. Oh, and then people reached out, you know, we're like that That's like the kiss of death, you know, that's academic suicide I didn't even know who he was like at the time when he contacted me years ago. I was like yeah, sure

I'll you want to hear I was like honored. I was like yeah, you want me to talk about our research So I did and then my inbox like exploded and I didn't realize that you know the reach he had and then it was you know lots of people you guys know Ben Greenfield and Tim Ferriss and I think I didn't realize that the reach he had and then it was, lots of people, you guys know, Ben Greenfield and Tim Ferris and I think it did a little over a hundred podcasts at this point and it had to talk. And that does give your research

much more visibility, kind of puts the pressure on you too. And I think, maybe that's the future of science and scientists are kind of introverted in many ways. And we'll stay in their little silo shelter of a lab and just publish mechanistic papers on this particular kinase or phosphatase. And it doesn't really have a whole lot of relevance. But my student and I were talking about this,

we're really lucky to be doing research that the public at least perceives as things that are very translatable. And when it comes to diet, there's like so much public interest in diet and people get very emotional about it. And it hits them like at the core. If you're promoting a diet because that empowers them,

it's not some weird esoteric pathway that you can develop a drug for that they can't really relate to. I mean, this is like not just macronutrient ratios, but specific types of foods and supplements and things that they can use to empower themselves to treat a disease or enhance their performance or whatever.

And that's pretty exciting because I was in a pharmacology department. And when I started doing this high fat diet research, I saw some people raising their eyebrows at me and just saying, you know, you just entered a tenure track position and you're trying to get tenure, trying to do research on a high fat diet. You know, they thought it was like the academic kiss

of death, you know, academic suicide. But I kind of knew intuitively, if you're doing research that people are interested in and it serves the public like in some way, like the information and research you're putting out there, it's gonna come back to you. Like even if the government agencies are not funding this kind of research, like if you're putting out good stuff,

like it's just gonna come back to you, you're gonna, we're gonna stay afloat one way or another. Don, do you ever have that fuck it? I just, instead of chasing all these grants, and I feel like you gotta connect a little bit with Navy SEALs, all this hard behind the scenes work that nobody really glorifies at all. Nobody ever hears about or knows, right?

Is there other, do you have moments in your career where you were like, you know what, I'm done, I'm gonna go make some money and that's all, because a guy with your level of intelligence, I feel like could do almost anything to really wash around. Yeah, and make a ton of money. Do you battle with that ever?

Well, also the thing that would make me markable or to make money is the science. So I'm really passionate about developing, because I believe in what we're doing, because we see it in the lab. And I feel like we're just at the cusp of this. And maybe if I was in my 10 years from now, in my mid 50s or something, and I would have a different perspective, but right now, I feel like we put in so much time and effort just to get this thing rolling

in many different directions. And, you know, we have students that are, you know, in the lab and things too, and they're working on projects. But, but I feel, you know, the science still needs to get out there, but when it comes to make it, yeah, a university setting can be very stifling.

And in many ways, because there's a massive amount of paperwork, and I spend 70%, maybe 80% of my time just doing paperwork, writing grants, and things like that, and not connecting with my students, and not kind of into trenches, you know, drawing blood, or measuring this like in the lab, where when you're a postdoc, I spent 95% of my time or 90% of my time just sitting at the bench like running experiments and doing like crazy kind of science stuff. And now it's just like a lot of paperwork because it's not just a science and I got to do teaching and I got to do committee service and all this other stuff. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be super conducive to the creative process, you know, to be

an admirer. Well, I know, you know, different scientists like Otto Warburg or even like Hans Kreb, if you guys know the Krebs cycle, like they're in their institutions, they actually freed them up. Like in the old, if you were kind of a productive scientist, they would pull all other obligations away from you and the university or institution would give you money. And just kind of put you in the corner, like go do good stuff and report back to us. Be free. Yeah. Be free. That's awesome. That's a new habit nowadays.

I guess if some donor, you know, Donates and says, we really like what you're doing. And we think that, you know, maybe if we can give you some money, of course, you know, there would be like benchmarks, you know, and every quarter report back to us on your findings and that's understandable. And like the Department of Defense does that. You have to give like technical reports. Do they give you more freedom than the universities do? Uh, yeah, they do. I would imagine because they're like, they're looking at the military and they're like, when you

figure out now before, you know, I think you get more and I added to it, right? Yeah, when you get funding from them, you have to write up technical reports. I think if it's, if you're DARPA funded, which is you got to do it like every month or like every quarter, but for the Department of Defense, like in May, I will go to the Office of Navy Research, Undersea Medicine, and I'll review where I got it step up on stage and present everything to the big waves. And this is what I did this year. And you know, these are the projects that I want to do and that sort of thing. And then it's kind of a conversation. So you don't not only submit technical reports, you have to kind of present your stuff to the organization. And that's, and that's, that's

to be it. That keeps you on, that keeps you in line too, right? Because if you didn't have these benchmarks, then you wouldn't be have something to strive for. And you could be steering off in this direction and that direction. So, Dom, do you feel like, because I got to imagine like when you're doing this type of research, you've got to just be buried in it. You know, like you've mentioned 16 hour days and just thinking about it probably non-stop. Like, do you find that you have exercises that you do to kind of detach or do you have things that you're interested in that grab, that you know that kind of helps separate that part of your life for balance.

I mean, my wife makes sure of that, right? So, yeah, it's like, when I got married, you're so ago, it was like, my weekends are for play for downtime and things like that, unless it's something some big conference that I could bring her to. But we have dogs in every night. We kind of take the dogs out and run with them.

And I try to get to the gym for me. I like motorcycles. So like the ultimate downtime for me is to kind of get home and get on my motorcycle and go to the gym and then listen to music and the combination of music, motorcycles, gym, heavy weights, you know, meeting, gym, heavyweights, meeting, talking, seeing some familiar faces and everything. That's a huge dopamine rush and dump and it just gets me back. It kind of resets my whole physiology. And then whatever is on my mind, I could have the worst day all day, but if I go to the gym and have a productive workout,

like everything changes. I think we can all connect with that for sure. But you seem like such a driven person that you probably just love what you're studying so much. If you don't check that, you'll just absorb yourself and everybody else disappears. And I think you guys can relate to that too, because you guys love what you do and what you do is awesome. And I can, like, I'm kind of really envious,

you're feeding off of all these people that you're bringing in and learning new things that you can apply to yourself and promote and disseminate the information out there. Yeah, my students will tell you, and I have to tell them to back off. I was like, you guys are working a little too hard there. You got to take some time off and enjoy things. But as scientists, one of the benefits that we have is that we present at conferences all over the world. So we do have the opportunity to go and present at all all these

different places. And we always take a day or two out to do some sightseeing and have some fun doing that. But no matter how busy it gets, I always block out X amount of time, you know, at the least it would be 30 minutes, but usually more than that per day, just in downtime. You know, talking about your peers and doing that, like who are some of your favorite humans that you've met and that you've got to mingle with and...

Or that you've said this, and research wise or whatever, like that you've came across. I mean, wow, there's so many of them that I consider mentors and good friends now. Like, people that had really big input from my PhD advisor, who was pretty inspirational. Dr. Jay Dean, who basically developed this idea of doing science inside these hyperbaric chambers and building microscope, synalyctrophysiology equipment inside these hyperbaric chambers to stimulate, and nobody else in the world was doing that. More recently, I have a position at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and that's

run by Dr. Kent Ford, who he found to me because he was actually doing the ketogenic diet for like a decade, and he was a former executive director person at NASA and developed his own institute, which is really about building kind of humanoid robots, like the stuff, like a terminator type things. And he got, I think their institute got second place in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. But his institute is two things. It's human and machine cognition. So it's developing robotic, developing different artificial intelligence, kind of projects and humanoid robots to basically understanding the science and the physiology of extreme environments.

So it's part of it's like engineering, artificial intelligence, and the other part is understanding the physiological limitations of these extreme environments and developing research programs to develop countermeasures, even ketones, as a countermeasure to enhance performance and extreme environments. A lot of it's NASA-based things. I've met some really fascinating people that have worked with, can including Michael Gernhart, who's been up on the space station many times and have played a big role in doing the EVAs and developing various technologies that are up on the space station many times and played a big role in doing the EVAs and developing various technologies

that are up on the space station now. He's an astronaut. He was also with Ken. He was the principal investigator of the lunar rover, the Mars rover project. And actually, when I was at NASA, Johnson Space Center, he gave me a complete tour of everything, including the neutral buoyancy lab, where the mock-up of the space station is underwater. And he took me to the rover and let me drive it out on the lawn. And doing like burn-outs and stuff. That's awesome. That was really cool.

It was expensive RC vehicle. Exactly. It's a pretty big vehicle. It's like, you know, we had three of us in there when we were driving it around. It was one joystick. I don't know. I couldn't spin on a dime. It was really cool.

So these are the kind of people that I never thought getting into this path of research would bring me in touch with these guys that are really icons in the field and icons and what they do. And they've been mentored to me in many ways. And working with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, my former, or my, a good friend of mine, Don Crenegas, who is also a full-time employee there, just served on the NASA Nemo 21 mission,

which is an Earth-based, base analog down in the Keys, and it's basically a laboratory underwater where you test out different technologies that are tracked for the International Space Station and Orion, or the, basically, what will be the mission to Mars. And so cool. And that's happening, right? I mean, didn't NASA just say, like, we are going the mission to Mars. And, and, you know, cool. And that's happening, right? I mean, didn't messages say like,

we are gonna go to Mars? Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of things that the public might not know about that need to be done, you know, in analogs here on Earth and it's testing different technologies, whether it be, you know, testing different foods or different, you know different drills or basically a whole range that dozens of technologies was they were studied on the NASA Nemo-21 mission.

And actually just recently our lab has, under the umbrella of IHMC, we'll be contributing to the NASA Nemo-22 mission, which will test nutritional ketosis. And we'll look at things like body composition, heart rate variability, we'll look at gut microbiome, we're gonna look at metabolomics, basically getting a snapshot of how our metabolism changes in that extreme environment and how ketones can help mitigate some of the effects.

It looks like a lot of money is going into using ketogenic diet or ketones to mitigate potential like damage like acute or long term type damage to the brain and the body extreme environments or oxygen, you know, hyper oxygenation or too little oxygen or concussion or all these different scenarios where, you know, you can cause some serious damage to your body. It looks like there's a lot of money going into looking how ketones can help help those situations. Is that, am I being accurate? Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like...

And even the heart, too. So the heart is probably, I think there's more data for the cardio protective properties of ketones for the heart than equally, or maybe even more so than the brain. And early work was done in the lab of Richard Veets, who was a student of Hans Krebs, the Krebs cycle. And his lab demonstrated an energetic efficiency of ketones in the heart, where you develop, fortunately, the hydraulic efficiency of the heart

was increased about 25%. Hydraulic efficiency of the heart was increased about 25% Hydraulic efficiency of using ketones to burning ketones and burning glucose Wow, so if I'm listening to this and I'm a listener I'm thinking to myself like okay Next time I go party for the next three days and I don't get any sleep and I'm doing a crazy I'm gonna eat a ketogenic diet to protect my brain from all this crazy stuff is that that sounds like a crazy leap but Maybe not I from all this crazy stuff. That sounds like a crazy leap, but maybe not. I think the science is supporting that. So, you know, as I tell you, there's your advice. Yeah.

Next time you go to Vegas. Yeah. You're the key to genetic diet. We're going to market that, bro. We're going to sell it. I'll just say the Vegas trip. Party ketones. If you're going to go party with hookers and coke, here's your first drink.

Maybe fasting too. Oh, don't mind. Yeah. Or maybe what I like to call it, like ketogenic supplemented ketogenic intermittent fasting. Well, they both have a lot of similar benefits, right? Right. When you get them side by side, the ketogenic diet and and intermittent fasting, I feel like that being said, we're all huge fans of, I mean, I typically intermittent fast at least once a week. I just kind of throw it in my routine. How often do you do it? I know you've, I know you did

your study where you did, I think, what, five days and then you deadlifted like 500 something pounds. I remember that. How often in your normal life, if you're not studying it, are you? Yeah. It varies, but it typically once or twice a week, you know, with my normal routine, unless I'm like testing something, you know, and sometimes it, like on my honeymoon, I think, where we went all through Southeast Asia, you know, I felt it was probably best to do a little bit of fasting. I just came back from Thailand, I just came back from Thailand. I was bedridden with food for Bornella.

Yeah, we went through like Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, all my wife's a crazy travel person. So yeah, so I fasted in some cases, brought some sardines on days like that. Oh, you still eat sardines for breakfast? I do, yeah. I do. All the smart people do at them. Not every day. So aardines for breakfast? I do, yeah. I do. All the smart people do at them.

Not every day. So a lot of times when I'm traveling, we do. We have that. That's this guy over here for you. What do you see now for? We're on the Sardines. Where do you see with, you know, just to kind of, in the episode, I want people to kind of look forward,

like, where do you see future research on ketones? Like, where should we point our gaze? Is it okay to make speculations on where you think they're going to start looking at, you know, how ketones can affect a body? Well, any research that's being done on metabolism, I think, is fair game for ketone research because ketones are an energy metabolism light that's superior in many ways to other fuels that our body can use. So whether that be neuroscience, cardiovascular,

oh, one of the papers that we got out in frontiers, neuroscience was the effect of ketones on anxiety behavior. So that's a good one. Yeah, and we were guvaging, or we were giving a dose of ketones to rats before we were diving them and observed that they were just easier to handle, easier to, you know, they were just calm, they were really chill. So we realized that we weren't anesthetizing them because when we put them on like a treadmill

device, they can run equal or farther, you know. So it wasn't like they were sedating them. So it was actually my wife had the idea, well let's get the equipment to do like an elevated plus maze and do these anxiety kind of measurements. And the data was really robust on that showing that it attenuates fear behavior. So with the type of experiment that we did, it's called an elevated plus me, is the rats can go into a little cave or they can come out like on a catwalk where they basically it's just like a platform where they could fall off the edge. They have to have, you know, an intuitive exploratory behavior and not be afraid of it. And there was much more time and you set up a camera to determine, to calculate all the

time they're in the open arm, versus the little cave or closed arm, and how many times they go in and out, and in all different ways to analyze it. But the bottom line was that the rats had less fear response and more exploratory behavior when they were in a state of nutritional ketosis. Wow. And that has, we think, implications. We just published that maybe a month or two ago. And it has direct implications, we think,

for guys with PTSD, or brain injury too, where it can kind of contribute to fear, but definitely PTSD. I want to see some studies. I want to see some studies with ADD and ADHD. Yeah, because I would assume, I'm assuming, but I would assume there would be some effect, maybe a positive effect.

I know anecdotally, I belong to fitness and nutrition forums and you got parents on there like, well, man, when I have my kids eat more fat and really restrict their carbohydrates, and I don't know if it's just because they're eating less sugar or whatever, but their ADD gets much better. Yeah, and I get a steady stream of parents that contact me that, and they did,

it's not even the huge, it's just getting their kids off sugar and replacing carbohydrates with fat and... Don't say that to Lane. Yeah, I'm not the sugar. Oh, all right. But yeah, Lane kind of has ADDD too, I think. He's like, that's why he's a denial.

He'll tell you about it. He'll tell you about it. He'll tell you about it. I'll let him tell you about it. But yeah, he, you know, and I think that can actually contribute, if you can channel that into productive things, which I think Lane is an awesome, you know, example of that where he can channel emotions, he can channel ADHD and channel that into productive things that are helping

people. We have a lot to learn from that. I think a lot of the high achievers out there, many of them are people that have ADHD. The classic picture of Einstein's desk and it's just covered in shit and it's super disorganized. You hear that a lot about, you know, smart people. So if you know, I always say that when people talk about how messy my car is on the inside. Well, excuse me. I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm not going to get it nice. Yeah.

And he tried to simple, like he didn't even wear socks because it was like another thing he had to think about. Too much. That's just one, two, three things. Yeah. Well, excellent, man. It's great to have you on. Yeah, Dom. It's been awesome having you down to many things. Excellent, man. It's great to have you on. Yeah, Dom, it's been awesome having you down here, man.

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