Dr. Ben Bikman explains how elevated ketones double the metabolic rate in fat tissue. His lab found that ketosis increases how fast fat cells burn energy, a finding tested in animal models and human tissue samples.
One of the very earliest observations that I made as a scientist was actually rediscovering work that had been published about a hundred years ago, where these early scientists, legendary in their own right, documented that people with type 1 diabetes had a metabolic rate that was significantly higher than it should have been based on their body weight. Generally, metabolic rate is a function of how much body we have or body weight body mass. However, in these individuals, we when their diabetes was poorly controlled and of course ketone levels were high, metabolic rate was too high. I want to share with you the results of a paper that my lab published. Here's the title of it. What we documented here was that when ketones were elevated at the fat tissue, that metabolic rate in that fat tissue went up substantially. Importantly, as you see noted here in the results section, we actually observed this phenomenon in all of the models we used. Whether it was fat cells treated in a petri dish, whether it was the fat tissue from animals that were in ketosis, or whether it was fat tissue from humans that were in ketosis. In every instance, metabolic rate went up, often by double, and in the human fat tissue by even more than two times the metabolic rate when ketones were at a normal level. This is an inconvenient finding, but ketones increase the metabolic rate of our fat tissue.
