- Messages
- 2,170
- Type of diabetes
- Type 2
- Treatment type
- Diet only
@sock Fiddler -
In reply to your blog question - I thought I would post on the public forum, so others can learn/ correct/ contribute as appropriate .
a bit more research for you to get your head around - dreadfully oversimplified by me
There are three ways to measure ketones and three types of ketones.
I think about this in three stages ( which may be utterly wrong but makes sense to me )
a) peeing out the excess in urine ( like blood sugar problem ) because the body cannot yet process fats effectively but it is starting to make a lot of use of fats , you are calorie deficient overall so fat isn't going into your fat stores anymore and you are peeing out the stuff you put in that it can't yet use because its not yet fully fat adapted.
b) increasing the level of ketones in your blood because the body is now switching properly to fat burning - the ketones could be exogenous ( because you ate a lot of fat) or endogenous ( because you are retrieving it from your fat store )- you don't know which. So now you have much more circulating ketone bodies in your system which you can measure through blood ketones .
c) breathing out ketones because you have processed the fats in your blood and now you are expelling the waste products i.e. you are really using the actual FAT in your system and the exhaust pipe is switched on.
You may well be doing b) and c) at earlier stages in the process, just that the ketone measures you are using can't actually tell you that until you get to c)
Effectively you can measure these stages as you embark on the journey.
a) the first and cheapest is ketostix which measures it in urine.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bayer-Keto...=UTF8&qid=1501238842&sr=8-2&keywords=ketostix
These work well at first because you pee out ketones when first adapting to a keto diet and the sticks tend to tend a deeper shade the more into ketosis you are which is very satisfying,
Once you have been fat adapted for while they no longer work so well. By way of example I just did the test this minute and had a pale pink shade at the very first level of ketosis - so I know I am in ketosis but it doesn't look like its working very well. When I did this test 6 months ago after a more calorific diet than I have eaten this week I was well up the colour chart range. As far as I understand it the reason is that once your body is properly running on fat it, it either uses it within the body or expels it through the breath and it no longer feels the need to pee the excess out ( A bit like blood sugars where you get a lot of sugar in urine) .
b) The second stage is Blood Ketones - these effectively show how well your body is adapted to running on fat - the same test at the same moment for me currently shows blood ketones at 1.7 mmol, i.e. well in the nutritional ketosis range - this shows that my body is utilising ketones efficiently as opposed to carbs - which it should be because my total carbs over the last 6 days is only 130g.
The way to think about this is that blood ketones show how well your body is running on fat - you can induce exogenous ( external) ketones by for example eating MCT oil this doesn't actually help you lose weight it just means you are now burning the fat you are introducing to your diet and over time your urine ketones will still go down, you will still be " fat adapted " but you won't actually lose weight. You will only lose weight is your body is burning more ketones than are being consumed ( just like carbs in fact ). So it is perfectly possible to maintain or increase weight and be in ketosis - as many athletes are , you just have to eat enough fats and proteins.
You can buy a blood ketone meter from Amazon for £25, and the 25 sticks for about £20 . so this is rather an expensive process. the good news being that actually once in ketosis there is no real need to check again for a while unless you know you relaxed your diet. There is a tendency to want to check a lot though so that gets expensive at nearly £ 1 per strip.
There is a school of thought that the more fat adapaed you are, the harder it is to get high readings on the blood ketone meters - so a truly fat adapted individual may well have very low blood sugar AND very low blood ketones - meaning that his body is running supremely efficiently using very little energy overall.
c) The third stage is through measuring breath ketones.
Breath ketones show how will your body is actually burning the fat in your blood stream as the product of that process is expelled in breathe as waste , measured in parts per million and called BrAce
Research has been done that tries to correlate blood and breath ketones which shows that whilst there is a connection its not that obvious - which suggests that many people can eat low enough carbs to get into ketosis, but too much fat to get into endogenous ( i.e internally generated ketosis ) from burning your own fat.
https://optimisingnutrition.com/2015/07/20/the-glucose-ketone-relationship/
Often people chase getting into ketosis by consuming the relevant products which you see being marketed all the time - e.g. raspberry ketones and MCT Oil , or by adding bullet proof coffee- so they are happy that they are achieving a high level of blood ketosis . They are not necessarily actually losing weight - I think this is what I have been doing for the last six months that my weight has been on a plateau. I think you will only lose weight by adding these products if the resulting feelings of satiety reduce your desire for other foods by more calories more than eating the coffee etc consumed ( which I have found to be true for the bullet proof coffee) . Other may have different views.
For me the real goal for weight loss is not ketosis per se, its increasing the amount of internal fat you are using and that can be measured through breath- a Ketonix machine.
https://www.ketonix.com/index.php?o...category&layout=blog&id=29&Itemid=433&lang=en
Research studies have been done that correlate the extent of expelled ketones called BrAce and measured in parts per million and the rate of weight loss
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737348/
"
The amount of caloric restriction has the next greatest impact on BrAce. Fasting, the extreme form of caloric restriction, can elevate BrAce, up to 170 ppm over the course of weeks, more than macronutrient changes in adults (Figure (Figure1).1). However, fasting is not a sustainable lifestyle whereas a HFLC diet can be a lifestyle that leads to long term elevated acetone levels.
Less extreme than fasting is moderate caloric restriction which allows some food intake and appears to cause modest changes in breath acetone. Breath acetone levels rise as stored fat is metabolized to make up the difference between basal energy requirements and caloric intake. Using caloric restriction, multiple studies have shown a correlation between fat loss and increases in breath acetone 8, 24, 25, 27, 29. Specifically, individuals that maintain a breath acetone of 2 ppm should realize a fat loss rate of at least 114‐227 g week−1, based on the scientific literature 8, 27, 29. On the high end, BrAce could reach 8 ppm which could correspond to a fat loss of 1,200 g week−1 8.
As you know I have been trying to " fast" or at least keep to a very low calorie, very low carb diet whilst still exercising this week. My 6 day calorie deficiency compared to requirement has been about 1800 per day as a result and I have lost 4.6 kg as a result ( mainly water weight I know). My BrAce currently is 9ppm slightly higher than the 1.2 kg per week fat loss above., though nowhere near the 170 ppm achievable through actual fasting for a long time)
Ketonix is not cheap to buy ( I have the red one 189 usd ) however the advantage is that once purchased there are no ongoing expenses and you can test anytime of day.
I hope the above make ketone measurement a bit more understandable and i look forward to finding ut more about it myself from others more knowledgeable than me.
In reply to your blog question - I thought I would post on the public forum, so others can learn/ correct/ contribute as appropriate .
a bit more research for you to get your head around - dreadfully oversimplified by me
There are three ways to measure ketones and three types of ketones.
I think about this in three stages ( which may be utterly wrong but makes sense to me )
a) peeing out the excess in urine ( like blood sugar problem ) because the body cannot yet process fats effectively but it is starting to make a lot of use of fats , you are calorie deficient overall so fat isn't going into your fat stores anymore and you are peeing out the stuff you put in that it can't yet use because its not yet fully fat adapted.
b) increasing the level of ketones in your blood because the body is now switching properly to fat burning - the ketones could be exogenous ( because you ate a lot of fat) or endogenous ( because you are retrieving it from your fat store )- you don't know which. So now you have much more circulating ketone bodies in your system which you can measure through blood ketones .
c) breathing out ketones because you have processed the fats in your blood and now you are expelling the waste products i.e. you are really using the actual FAT in your system and the exhaust pipe is switched on.
You may well be doing b) and c) at earlier stages in the process, just that the ketone measures you are using can't actually tell you that until you get to c)
Effectively you can measure these stages as you embark on the journey.
a) the first and cheapest is ketostix which measures it in urine.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bayer-Keto...=UTF8&qid=1501238842&sr=8-2&keywords=ketostix
These work well at first because you pee out ketones when first adapting to a keto diet and the sticks tend to tend a deeper shade the more into ketosis you are which is very satisfying,
Once you have been fat adapted for while they no longer work so well. By way of example I just did the test this minute and had a pale pink shade at the very first level of ketosis - so I know I am in ketosis but it doesn't look like its working very well. When I did this test 6 months ago after a more calorific diet than I have eaten this week I was well up the colour chart range. As far as I understand it the reason is that once your body is properly running on fat it, it either uses it within the body or expels it through the breath and it no longer feels the need to pee the excess out ( A bit like blood sugars where you get a lot of sugar in urine) .
b) The second stage is Blood Ketones - these effectively show how well your body is adapted to running on fat - the same test at the same moment for me currently shows blood ketones at 1.7 mmol, i.e. well in the nutritional ketosis range - this shows that my body is utilising ketones efficiently as opposed to carbs - which it should be because my total carbs over the last 6 days is only 130g.
The way to think about this is that blood ketones show how well your body is running on fat - you can induce exogenous ( external) ketones by for example eating MCT oil this doesn't actually help you lose weight it just means you are now burning the fat you are introducing to your diet and over time your urine ketones will still go down, you will still be " fat adapted " but you won't actually lose weight. You will only lose weight is your body is burning more ketones than are being consumed ( just like carbs in fact ). So it is perfectly possible to maintain or increase weight and be in ketosis - as many athletes are , you just have to eat enough fats and proteins.
You can buy a blood ketone meter from Amazon for £25, and the 25 sticks for about £20 . so this is rather an expensive process. the good news being that actually once in ketosis there is no real need to check again for a while unless you know you relaxed your diet. There is a tendency to want to check a lot though so that gets expensive at nearly £ 1 per strip.
There is a school of thought that the more fat adapaed you are, the harder it is to get high readings on the blood ketone meters - so a truly fat adapted individual may well have very low blood sugar AND very low blood ketones - meaning that his body is running supremely efficiently using very little energy overall.
c) The third stage is through measuring breath ketones.
Breath ketones show how will your body is actually burning the fat in your blood stream as the product of that process is expelled in breathe as waste , measured in parts per million and called BrAce
Research has been done that tries to correlate blood and breath ketones which shows that whilst there is a connection its not that obvious - which suggests that many people can eat low enough carbs to get into ketosis, but too much fat to get into endogenous ( i.e internally generated ketosis ) from burning your own fat.
https://optimisingnutrition.com/2015/07/20/the-glucose-ketone-relationship/
Often people chase getting into ketosis by consuming the relevant products which you see being marketed all the time - e.g. raspberry ketones and MCT Oil , or by adding bullet proof coffee- so they are happy that they are achieving a high level of blood ketosis . They are not necessarily actually losing weight - I think this is what I have been doing for the last six months that my weight has been on a plateau. I think you will only lose weight by adding these products if the resulting feelings of satiety reduce your desire for other foods by more calories more than eating the coffee etc consumed ( which I have found to be true for the bullet proof coffee) . Other may have different views.
For me the real goal for weight loss is not ketosis per se, its increasing the amount of internal fat you are using and that can be measured through breath- a Ketonix machine.
https://www.ketonix.com/index.php?o...category&layout=blog&id=29&Itemid=433&lang=en
Research studies have been done that correlate the extent of expelled ketones called BrAce and measured in parts per million and the rate of weight loss
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737348/
"
The amount of caloric restriction has the next greatest impact on BrAce. Fasting, the extreme form of caloric restriction, can elevate BrAce, up to 170 ppm over the course of weeks, more than macronutrient changes in adults (Figure (Figure1).1). However, fasting is not a sustainable lifestyle whereas a HFLC diet can be a lifestyle that leads to long term elevated acetone levels.
Less extreme than fasting is moderate caloric restriction which allows some food intake and appears to cause modest changes in breath acetone. Breath acetone levels rise as stored fat is metabolized to make up the difference between basal energy requirements and caloric intake. Using caloric restriction, multiple studies have shown a correlation between fat loss and increases in breath acetone 8, 24, 25, 27, 29. Specifically, individuals that maintain a breath acetone of 2 ppm should realize a fat loss rate of at least 114‐227 g week−1, based on the scientific literature 8, 27, 29. On the high end, BrAce could reach 8 ppm which could correspond to a fat loss of 1,200 g week−1 8.
As you know I have been trying to " fast" or at least keep to a very low calorie, very low carb diet whilst still exercising this week. My 6 day calorie deficiency compared to requirement has been about 1800 per day as a result and I have lost 4.6 kg as a result ( mainly water weight I know). My BrAce currently is 9ppm slightly higher than the 1.2 kg per week fat loss above., though nowhere near the 170 ppm achievable through actual fasting for a long time)
Ketonix is not cheap to buy ( I have the red one 189 usd ) however the advantage is that once purchased there are no ongoing expenses and you can test anytime of day.
I hope the above make ketone measurement a bit more understandable and i look forward to finding ut more about it myself from others more knowledgeable than me.
