Dorian Greenow explains three ways to measure ketones: urine, breath, and blood testing. Blood meters are most accurate and certified, while urine strips are cheap but unreliable once you're fat-adapted. Breath testing falls somewhere in between.
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What happens with pricking your finger? What happens with breath, what happens with pee? And also, when are we going to get a stick on keto monitor that just does 24, 7? Are you going to make that? So there you go. One question. Give me the technology landscape for people who want to know what their ketones are.
All right, so first of all, and we talk ketones, but there are three different types of ketones. You've got acetoacetate, which can be detected sometimes in urine. That's a urinalysis strip. There is beta hydroxybutyrate, which is measured in the blood, and there is acetone that can be detected in the breath, but they're not all created equal. About 28% of the energy that is available in the body is in acetoacetate and that can get spilled into your urine. And then when you're using your urinalysis strip, you're basically detecting an amalgam of what might have potentially been spilled during this time. But it is affected by hydration. You could be really hydrated, therefore the blood is diluted. Therefore it won't really show a quantitative amount. It will show a subjective amount. Light pink, dark pink, or is it really, really dark red? Does that mean that I've got ketoacidosis? Because they were originally designed for type 1 diabetics to show a very high amount of ketones. So they're really more of an on, off switch with a bit of gray in the middle. Now, breath.
That's why mine didn't work, by the way, back in the 90s, because it was 0 to 50 and I needed 0 to 5. Basically.
They still haven't changed. They still use a nitrous peroxide chemical reaction. And, you know, actually we do. Kiyomojo does have a urinalysis strip and we put it on Amazon on and it's the cheapest strip that is out there. We don't make any profit, but we actually, if you read the manual in the back there, we'll tell you why it doesn't work. Because we want people not to get ripped off by thinking that they're going to have a urinalysis strip and then one, then they get stressed and frustrated. So buy it and there'll be a coupon in there for whatever. Then we come to breath. Now, breath is acetone and that's sort of like an exhaust, if you will. It represents about 2% of the energy that is in the body. And the challenge with breath meters is you cannot sluice them for trigger foods because most of the trigger foods will cause a false positive. Things like alcohol, sugar, alcohols, lozenges, gums, and those kinds of things, they can coke the sensor. And the challenge with coking the sensors is they use a heat cycle to burn off that contaminant, which coax it up some more until eventually it doesn't actually yield you a good result. And because you can't replace any of sensors that is in there, except for the level, which is like a $600 machine. I mean, the level was the one that came closest to it. The other ones, generally they vary too much. So the gold standard is blood. It is when you have a blood meter, ketone and glucose together. It is a Class 2 medical device, and that means it's held to a really high standard of quality because somebody could be adjusting their insulin to the data that they're receiving, and that has to be right. Otherwise someone will have a hypoglycemic episode, and you don't have a hypoglycemic episode in the car. So there's a real safety that comes on into play. And so for our meter, not only does it have FDA certification, but it has Euroce certification. It also has MDSAP certification. And we follow. Now even our factory is inspected by the FDA as well to make sure that everything is right. So those are the three different types. And blood represents 70% of the energy in the body. It's the gold standard. It is what all the clinicians and researchers use because it can be correlated back to an ISO.
