Key Benefits of Ketones | Michael Brandt x Dave Asprey

Let's talk about benefits of raising ketone levels. Do they actually cause mitochondria to work better or do you grow new mitochondria? What do they do?

We're seeing both that we see increased mitochondrial efficiency and a few different ways to measure that. There's one is the conversion of substrate into ATP, the energy currency of the cell. Ketones convert into ATP in your mitochondria using less oxygen but than other metabolites. So you're basically able to get energy for easier. And the first customer that we had, that my company had was I in 2019, we got a $6 million contract with the United States Department of Defense Special Operations Command. And they were specifically interested in fatigue states and fatigue states at hypoxia. So at altitude or deep sea where you have less oxygen availability, you have less oxygen availability. When you're at altitude, you also just have less oxygen availability when you're training really hard, when you're out of breath, when you're not able to get enough oxygen to feed the needs of your muscles and your neurons and, and all the cells in your body. And the ability of ketones to turn into at ATP more efficiently ends up recovering significant performance across muscle cells and especially cognitive cognition markers because of that ease of conversion into ATP, again requiring less oxygen. And the same holds true at sea level as well. When you're not in a hypoxic state, you just have easier creation of energy create. It costs less energy to deliver energy to your cells. And then there's other factors too that we've seen where which is that ketones clean up reactive oxygen species. They reduce oxidative stress, which you know, oxidative stress is the gunk in your. If your body is an engine, then you're creating engine gunk as you age. And oxidative stress is one of the key biomarkers of aging. And ketones actually clean that up. And that's not something you're necessarily going to feel right away. What you will feel is like your brain is, is able to function more clearly. But also what's going on in the background is you're cleaning up oxidative stress and you're doing just cleaner metabolism.

That's what the preeminent researchers are finding. Certainly that's been my experience. And a lot of people just feel so much better even on something very basic like MCT oil, which itself was inspired by the Tibetans. Their yak butter tea drink is also a ketosis beverage. And they don't always take it without carbs. But what they're doing there is they're taking the processing the body would have done to turn the water in yak butter, tea into the kind of water we use to make ATP. They're actually doing that outside the body. So you drive efficiencies in the body by doing as much processing outside the body. The preeminent way we do this as humans is called cooking. So we can process our food in the kitchen to make it so it's more bioavailable for us. We can do it in a good way or a bad way for our biology. You're using a fermentation process to make this stuff so my body doesn't have to do all that and I don't have to create the low carb conditions to do it. And it comes in and you're seeing an improvement in mitochondrial biogenesis and an improvement in mitochondrial function because ketones actually have more electrons than carbs. So this is like the direct mechanistic way. And there are lots of studies now that support that ketones have all these benefits, including the anti Alzheimer's effect. In fact, even MCT oil, which is a very weak donor. Since the 90s it's been available as a medical food at very high cost with lots of studies supporting it's that it improves Alzheimer's. So you look at something like Ketone iq, which is much stronger. The effects on brain function are, are crazy. You mentioned working with special operators. I had a chance to meet my friends over at Black Rifle Coffee and these guys are all former CIA and special operator guys. And they're saying, Dave, when we were in the CIA out of special forces, we all had brain damage from all the concussive blast. This is real common in veterans. And our brains were fried. So we were drinking bulletproof coffee all the time because it was the only thing that would turn our brains on. It was an inspiration for us to get into the coffee business because like coffee is such a powerful thing. And so you find these things where people's brains are stressed or they aren't working as well. And that's always true in a special operations thing because even if you haven't had any traumatic brain injuries, you're still, you know, in a high stress situation, circadian disruption, you know, doing really dangerous things. So more electrons in the brain, a reduction, oxidative stress equals. Even if you do get a brain injury, which can happen in the field, you're much less likely to have long term problems from it. Same thing. Guys like Nick Foles, who just retired yesterday when he won the Super Bowl. He was on MCT Oil and Coffee and he wrote about it in his memoir because, well, if you're quarterback and your brain doesn't work, you're in trouble, you're going to get hit. Should you have ketones present? Yes. Should you have ketone IQ present? Yes. So if I was an MMA or I was in any kind of a situation where I'm likely to hit my head, I am always going to be on ketone IQ in those situations because, well, I had better functioning brain and I have more energy to deal with any type of injuries that happen. So I, I think this is a pretty profound way to do it.

That's huge. And that's a big area of continued research that we have. We have a project going with the Navy Health Research center looking specifically at TBI concussions and how ketone IQ can mitigate the symptoms of acute TBI as well as chronic TBI and rescue brain energy in those contexts. Because in addition to everything that you're saying, it's also that your ketones in your brain are not mediated by insulin. It's a different pathway to metabolism than carbohydrate glucose metabolism. And so when you have that impairment, when you have blunt trauma to your, your head, you have this damage done that, you know, there's, there's damage on in the moment, but then there's this continued damage done. If you continue starving your neurons and if you're able to provide additional substrate via ketones, you're able to rescue a lot of the what would be follow on damage from the starving neurons. And then we also see people, you know, someone who had a concussion a year ago and they just like have foggy brain sometime. They feel like. We do a lot of work with a special operator. There's the general military community, veteran community, and people say, there's one guy I was talking to talking about how it felt like the rust was coming off the chains. Like the first time he tried ketone iq, he's like, wow, I feel like the rust is coming off my chains. I feel like I'm thinking the way that I used to think 15 years ago. And.