A Deep Dive Into Ketosis: How Navy Seals, Extreme Athletes & Busy Executives Can Enhance Physical and Mental Performance With The Secret Weapon of Ketone Fuel

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And if the concept of low carbohydrate, high fat eating, or ketosis are anything that is of any interest to you, then you are going to absolutely love today's interview. A few weeks ago, I was at an event called the Ancestral Health Symposium, and there was a guy there that was presenting some really fascinating research that he's been doing on ketones and ketone intake and fat intake and performance. And his name is Dr. Dominique D' Agostino and he's a professor at the University of South Florida. And he's doing some really remarkable research. So, for example, he's done experiments on mice where he's found that a ketogenic diet combined with something called oxygen therapy can literally like starve tumor cells, starve cancer cells, since cancer cells feed on glucose. But he's taking a lot of his research and not just looking at things like cancer, but also performance and exercise efficiency and how that's related to ketosis as well. And Dominique is actually on the call with us today. We're going to delve into some of the research that he's been doing. We're going to talk about some of the practical aspects of how you can useyou can use some of the findings that he's come across as far as the use of ketones, the use of a high fat diet. We'll talk a little bit about supplementation, about safety, about carbohydrates, everything. So, Dominique, thanks for coming on the call today, man.

Thanks for having me, Ben. Appreciate it.

So let's jump into this poster presentation that you did at the Ancestral Health Symposium. Can you kind of explain the research that you're presenting there so that we bring folks up to speed?

Yeah, sure. Well, the title of the poster, you know what it initially was, prior to the abstract submission, was a project that stemmed from the research that I do funded by the Office of Navy Research, specifically to kind of enhance the Navy SEAL warfighter physical performance, but most importantly, their resilience to the undersea environment, which when they're using Navy Seals use what's called a closed circuit oxygen rebreather. And if you're familiar with scuba diving, you're probably familiar with rebreathers. Their closed circuit rebreather allows them to breathe oxygen. There's no bubbles coming out. There's a stealth component to it. An advantage is that it's very quiet. A disadvantage is that it gives you seizures. So the research that I've done is to figure out why the seals get seizures using this oxygen rebreather and to develop a mitigation strategy against it. In the process of doing that, in the process of developing neuroprotective strategies to extend their time underwater, we looked at anti seizure drugs and a number of other things that just flat out didn't work. Then I saw that the ketogenic diet was used for drug resistant epilepsy. Oxygen seizures are actually drug resistant. I looked into this. I had a personal interest in the ketogenic diet. Years ago we were able to develop a ketogenic diet in a pill. You could say the advantage is that you can circumvent the dietary restriction that was needed to elevated levels of ketosis of ketone bodies. And feeding this to, in our rodent model, we found it to be incredibly neuroprotective and it prevented seizures from oxygen toxicity above and beyond any drug therapy that we tested. And come to find out that these ketone bodies are a very efficient source of energy. So ketones in old literature were thought of metabolic poison, but we know that they're a form of energy that can be used by almost all cells in the body. Actually cancer cells can't use them, but that's another story. Recognizing this, we expanded our applications beyond the Navy SEAL stuff and we looked at things like Alzheimer's disease. We had a paper come out last week on that cancer als and this was all rodent model stuff. After the abstract submission to Ancestral Health, I did some just very preliminary work in humans and I was taking it myself and a couple friends were on the poster. Actually Peter Attia did some research.

By the way, when you say you were taking it yourself, you're saying that you weren't just say eating a, a high fat, low carb diet to induce ketosis, you're actually consuming ketones.

Yeah, well, I, I practice, you know, low carb diet and, and so I'm always in some state of mild ketosis. And when I, if I measure my ketones, I'm almost always above 0.5. And you know, it's kind of an arbitrary definition, but people, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of thought that if you're above half a millimolar of ketones, you're kind of in nutritional ketosis. So I always have some level of ketones, unless I intentionally eat carbohydrates to get out of ketosis. When I take oral forms of ketones, depending if it's a ketone ester or recently developed ketone salts or even MCT oil, probably the most potent would be caprylic acid and 8 carbon medium chain. So either one of those or a combination of those things can artificially elevate blood ketone levels. In essence, you're elevating a blood level of a very efficient metabolic substrate that can improve and augment performance and crosses the blood brain barrier. When you're on a ketogenic diet or you fast, you break down fats, but they can't readily cross the blood brain barrier ketones do. So you're giving your brain alternative form of energy that can potentially enhance cognition. You know, when it comes from an oxygen toxicity thing, we know high oxygen actually impairs brain energy metabolism. So the ketones can preserve brain energy metabolism in the face of an oxidative challenge, you know, which would be hyperbaric oxygen. Breathing oxygen in a hyperbaric environment basically hits your brain with, with a big load of oxidative stress, free radicals are produced and you have impaired brain metabolism. And the ketones prevent that in ways that we don't fully understand. But one way I think is that it's just really giving your brain, it's juicing your brain up and protecting it and preserving the brain metabolism, but it's also directly inhibiting some of the reactive oxygen species that we see. There seems to be a direct antioxidant effect, the ketones. And also if you're enhancing mitochondrial efficiency and mitochondrial function, you get less of the reactive oxygen species being produced.

So in a state of low oxygen availability, such as you might see in these Navy SEAL divers, obviously the use of ketones or being in a state of ketosis sounds like it can help tremendously in that situation. But what about in a state of low oxygen availability, such as during exercise, say for somebody riding a bicycle or running or something like that?

Do you see similar effects or even at altitude? Yeah, that's a good question. And what we've shown, preliminary data shown that there's an improvement in work output per oxygen molecule consumed. So one could hypothesize, based on our preliminary data, that that you have improved oxygen efficiency. So you would be able to essentially derive more energy from the food that you're oxidizing the calories that you're oxidizing. This is of interest to the Air Force aviation medicine. I'm kind of working with some folks to develop an experimental model where we create hypoxia and then we look at motor performance and we look at cognitive performance with and without ketones. And it will answer the question if ketosis can confer hypoxic resilience and just producing hypoxia at low levels of oxygen. And that would have implications, too, for exercise if you're improving oxygen efficiency by enhancing mitochondrial efficiency and delivering an energy substrate where you can just generate more energy from the given amount of oxygen. Also, ketones have a property that we're now, one of the projects we're doing is a wound healing project, and we use a Doppler blood flow measurement, and we see that it dilates the blood. It dilates the vessels to where we get blood flow where it's most needed. And there's a vasodilation effect that we're just starting to understand. So that's another. So you could have improved oxygen delivery, too, is another thing.

So can you explain why it is that ketones could cause this kind of effect? Why is it that using something like ketones as a fuel versus using something like glucose as a fuel, say, on a brain level or on a cellular level, why is it that it would actually cause something like that to occur?

Okay, well, if we're following a standard diet going back to the brain, the brain uses glucose as its primary fuel. In the absence of glucose or reduced glucose availability, the brain has the metabolic flexibility to adapt to using ketones. If you go on a ketogenic diet, your brain has no choice. You deplete your carbohydrate stores, your liver glycogen gets low, and you start pumping out ketones to reverse this decrement of brain energy. That's probably the main function. And I think coming answering that question, I think what it comes down to is that you're just supplying an alternative form of energy to the brain and your tissues and your body. And your brain is pretty set up to adapt to use glucose well, and it probably maximizes the transport, the utilization and the metabolism of glucose. And those mechanisms are kind of maxed out. So with ketosis, you're delivering kind of like a new metabolic fuel in pretty high concentrations. We're talking millimolar concentrations. So that's like a significant source of energy that the tissues are now seeing. And from an evolutionary perspective, you could probably argue that we have these mechanisms Built in the monocarboxylic acid transporter, to be specific, in our tissues. So we can readily take up these ketone molecules and oxidize them in the mitochondria for energy. From my perspective, it's more energy. So you have energetic, a metabolic substrate. Early experiments done in the heart show you have enhanced mitochondrial efficiency. The delta G of ATP hydrolysis is higher for a ketone per carbon molecule than glucose. So it's kind of like a super fuel. You could say it's been coined. And then you have things like, if you look at nutritional physiology, we have, is it enhancing blood flow so we get more blood flow to the muscles, to the brain. We have physiological parameters that could be altered in a way that could enhance cognitive function, motor performance. So I kind of see more energy, mitochondrial efficiency, and physiological parameters that we fully don't understand yet, like brain blood flow or, you know, perhaps it's upregulating a buffering mechanism. Jeff Volek did some work showing that branched chain amino acids are elevated, which would have implications if you're training hard, you know, having an anti catabolic effect. You know, the ketones do too. So I think the ketones definitely, even from an evolutionary perspective, we stop eating. You know, our catabolic pathways are activated gluconeogens. We're breaking down a lot of muscle for energy until the ketones are sufficiently elevated. And the ketones have an anti catabolic effect and they help you preserve your lean body mass in the face of starvation or the face of low glucose.

Right.

So there's many different things to talk about, but I think it's not one or the other, but a combination of things kind of working together.

So let's say that somebody was perhaps wanting to actually do something similar to what you had done in some of these studies and ingest ketones. So rather than simply go on a high fat, low carb diet and generate ketones via the use of fatty acids through burning fatty acids and generating ketones as a byproduct of that. What if someone actually wanted to ingest ketones? Are those available as supplements right now on the market? Are they FDA regulated? I mean, how would somebody actually go about doing something like that?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's. Well, the couple questions kind of come out of that question is, does exogenous ketones have benefits above and beyond nutritional ketosis, which is achieved with carbohydrate restriction? That's a big question that I get a lot actually in our experimental models. Absolutely. We've definitively shown that you give a high carb diet to an animal and you give them a ketone supplement and you get some really fascinating neuroprotective properties. So my answer is yes, it definitely confers a benefit above the ketogenic diet, but I think that the benefits that you get from giving exogenous ketones will be enhanced if your body's already keto adapted. If you're following a low carbohydrate diet, you have transporter mechanisms already upregulated to help exogenous ketones work you wouldn't like.

So what you're saying kind of is that somebody who's eating like a standard American diet or is eating a high carbohydrate diet couldn't just, say, hack their way into ketosis and find themselves extremely metabolically efficient just by, say, drinking ketones?

They can. But I think, yes, this is a question that we want to answer actually, and do. From my perspective, yes, that can occur and we see it in animal models. I think kind of the message that I want to get across though, is that if we're going to use ketosis as exogenous ketones to hack the system to get more energy, I think that if our bodies are keto adapted, meaning that if we're on a carbohydrate restricted ketogenic diet, our brain and our body are going to be used to seeing these ketones. Also, I think there's buffering. Elevated ketones produce a mild metabolic acidosis that has to be dealt with. And I think if you're slamming exogenous ketones and your body's not used to seeing that these ketone bodies, which have a mild acidic load on the body, it's going to be a little bit harder to buffer. And I see there's probably a sweet spot, right? And I think it's going to be, I think it's going to vary between each person. I think their tolerance and the benefits that they derive from exogenous ketones will vary between each person, person. And there's kind of depending on exercise, depending if they're elite athlete. I think elite athletes will benefit more because they're just used to going in and out of ketosis, which exercise can do that. But I think there's going to be a sweet spot regardless. I think adding any amount of elevating your blood ketones will definitely increase performance, but it's going to be up to the end user and do some self experimentation to figure out what's optimal and how to do that and I think. What else did I want to add to that? I think. And there's various ways to do it. That's what you're. So there's MCT oil, right? And there's caprylic acid, which is a fractionated mct. It's most ketogenic. And we have these ketones.

And both of those are in liquid for form, right?

Liquid form, yeah. Recently, the ketones that I had on the poster there, the study that we did was they're on the market now as a product called Ketoforce, all one word.

That's an actual supplement that you can buy called Ketoforce.

That's a supplement? Yeah. It's essentially ketone bodies that are combined with minerals, monovalent divalent cations. So you're buffering a ketone body with a mineral. And I think there's some advantages. Not only is it feeding ketones, you're kind of giving your body a buffering system. Sometimes on a ketogenic diet, it has a natural diuretic effect. So we tend to lose some minerals that are important, like sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, especially. And the company that has the Ketoforce product, prototype nutrition, the chemist there, Patrick Arnold, he's very innovative and developed some very innovative products, and working with him on other projects that I had, he's been able to really come up with some novel compounds that can have a lot of. Not only therapeutic potential, but enhancement of exercise performance potential.

Interesting. Do you know of athletes and stuff who are using that stuff right now?

Yeah, I know a few. I'm in contact with them. Because it's such a new product and there's not a whole lot of feedback on it, and the feedback that I'm getting is very positive. It is. You know, it's. It's sold as under prototype nutrition. And I think there's a good reason for that. It is a prototype. It's very new on the market.

Is it. Is it likely, like, for somebody who is competing in, say, like, a sanction event? Like, if you were doing like, a. Like an event that was sanctioned by the World Anti Doping association or something like that? Is. Is the stuff even legal? Like, could. Can you. Can you drink ketones? And, I mean, is it just as, say, legal as using MCT oil or.

Coconut oil at this time? From what I know, and I've inquired about this topic because there are ketone esters that were developed and used at Oxford University, and the results show a. You know, without a doubt, there's a performance benefit. And I've been in contact with some people that, you know, I've discussed this with and from my, from my knowledge that it's not banned at this time, so. And it would be kind of hard to test too because what if you're doing a, you know, just a ketogenic diet?

I mean, right. That's the thing is like you can just go out and do like an ironman triathlon and eat barely any carbs and be in a state of ketosis or you could eat, you could eat a decent amount of carbs, consume a bunch of ketones and also be in a state of ketosis.

Yeah.

So you could almost kind of achieve the best of both worlds if you figured out how to use this stuff properly. Right. And that you could maintain elevated glycogen levels, but then you could also maintain kind of like the focus and the mental advantages of being in a state.

Of ketosis glycogen sparing. Definitely. And that's really, that's the advantage of the carbohydrate restricted ketogenic diet is that it forces your body from a glucose based metabolism to a fatty acid and ketone metabolism and in doing so it will help your body spare muscle and liver glycogen with prolonged exercise. So you're not going to, it delays the bonking that's going to happen. Also I think one big advantage maybe might not be talked about much, but I mean, I think you're going to see, you've already probably seen it. Is that emerging kind of interest will be on the brain. I mean, if we can get the brain to perceive that we're not in trouble during prolonged exercise. Once there's. I studied the neural control of autonomic regulation for my PhD and I'm aware of autonomic mechanisms that if they're kicked in our bodies will shut down pretty quick. Even our bodies have the capacity to keep going, especially skeletal muscle, which is extremely plastic and adaptable and resilient. Skeletal muscle is, I think there's autonomic mechanisms in our brain in place to shut us down and to stop. And I think ketones can decrease perceived exertion. And we know that early studies were done and I'm doing studies right now. If you can put someone into severe hypoglycemia to the point where it would be put them into a coma and probably be fatal and their blood glucose would be at that level. But if ketones are available, there's no signs of hypoglycemia and there's no decrements in performance like you Know, I've gotten my glucose down to, you know, under 30. I've gotten it down to where the meter doesn't read it, it just says like it just flashes low. And I felt perfectly fine. And I've, you know, given lectures when that I've been perfectly intact. And I don't know of any available substance on the market that you know, would be able to do that. You know, ketones really preserve brain metabolism and the therapeutic implications are tremendous for insulin shock or hypoglycemic shock.

And so, you know, like with, with MCT oil, you could have a diaper day, right? If you take too much MCT oil, do you get, do you get similar unsafe kind of territory if you were to say, consume ketones as an energy source rather than going after MCT oil? Like, does it harden your stomach? Do you, do you feel strange in your head? Like, what's unsafe about this?

Well, I'll tell you my perspective and the feedback that I got. The ketones that are now available on the market are the ketone body is actually combined with a mineral. When you ingest it, it puts a mineral load on your stomach and there could be an osmotic shift, if you will, of fluid into or retention of fluid into the gut, which could definitely give you diarrhea. Could definitely stimulate peristalsis. Combining the ketone salts or ketoforce with a fat like for example, MCT oil or maybe some other kind of fat can delay gastric emptying and enhance the. I believe it can enhance the uptake and absorption of the ketones. So I think there's a synergism going on there. If we combine a keto force product with some type of fatty acid or triglyceride like MCT oil, I think there's a benefit there. Everyone will have a tolerance level. They'll likely be kind of like with drugs, right? You get this bell shaped curve and there's probably a sweet spot on that curve and that'll probably depend on your tolerability to it. I can tolerate well after using the product for a while. What I've seen is that I can tolerate a lot. I think our stomachs can upregulate transporter mechanisms that can ultimately prevent a lot of the gastric problems we're having. I've probably at double the amount that I could tolerate when I started it a few months ago. I think we can build tolerance and I think I found that.

How much do you take if somebody were to get their hands on ketones or keto salts rather Than MCT oil or whatever. Is there a gram or a number of tablespoons per hour or anything like that?

I think a safe place to start. I find that people have varied tolerance to mct. Someone can take a teaspoon and be in trouble where other people can get. So I think it's good to start low. And I think it's going to vary between people. I think it's safe for me and a large male, especially if you've had MCT before. One tablespoon of the Ketoforce. What's that, like 15 ML? I usually do things in milliliters, so 20 ML of a ketone salt and 20 ML of a quality MCT oil. I use one called bipyrillo Nutrition. It's actually like pure. It's pure caprylic acid. Get the highest ketones. So like a one to one ratio of that. And with a lot of water. So the ketone salts will produce a lot of minerals in your gut. So you want to buffer that. So I tend to drink a lot of water before actually take some branch chain amino acids. Amino acids are kind of good buffers too. I take 20ml MCT, 20ml of Ketoforce with 5 to 10 grams of branched chain amino acids and slam that with lots of water. And then I brew up some coffee with a little bit like butter and maybe a little bit of MCT in it and sip on that over another hour or so. And then shortly after that, I'll go to the gym or go exercise. I think the ketones are kind of maxing out at about two or three hours. I think you get the most benefits, and I like to take advantage of the benefits. When I'm sitting at my desk and just pounding out a lot of emails or working on a paper, I seem to have the most mental energy later in the day when my ketone levels are kind of elevated naturally from a diet, but also artificially with a little bit of.

Right, so you're using this. This is something that somebody who wasn't even exercising could use for, like, mental performance at the office by inducing a state of ketosis just during the day.

Yeah, there's a lot of talk about coconut oil being feeding the brain and delaying Alzheimer's or for treating Alzheimer's. And we know that coconut oil is about 60% MCT and you get the most ketone production you could probably get from coconut oil is like 0.3 to 0.4 millimolar, maybe 0.3 millimolar actually, you can get 10 times that amount with a ketone salt and definitely higher even if you combine it with an mct.

So.

It'S a pretty potent way to elevate ketones. There's been a lot of discussion and even research on ketosis for that disorder, Alzheimer's disease, there's definitely cognitive benefits. Actually, it's been shown. I think Henderson in 2008 showed a product called AC1202, which is. They made that. The name is kind of technical sounding, but essentially this AC1202 product was caprylic acid, which is MCT and caused an increase in cognitive function in people with mild cognitive impairment. So it's not a drug, and it's now sold as a medical food called Axona. But the early study that legitimized it in a double blind, placebo controlled study showed that 20 grams of an MCT, which was caprylic acid, enhance cognitive function. And it was, you know, that was published. And then Mary Newport, actually, the woman that I know, she's a pediatrician and she gave her husband coconut oil, and he had a positive response to it and wrote a book about it. And there's been a lot of publicity there.

What's the name of that book?

The book is called I have it on My Desk. And actually, Mary will be a guest speaker in my class. The book is called Alzheimer's Disease. What if There Was a Cure? The Story of Ketones, and it's been a best seller on Amazon.

I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes. I'll find it.

Great, Great.

Alzheimer's Disease. What if There Was a Cure? The Benefits of Ketones.

The Story of Ketones.

The Story of ketones. Okay.

Dr. Mary Newport, she's a pediatrician, kind of lives in the Tampa area where I'm at.

Okay, cool. And the name of this supplement you were talking about is called ketoforce.

Ketoforce.

And that's just straight up ketone bodies in the form of keto salts.

That's the purest form of ketones. Yeah. You can buy on the market.

Is that beta hydroxybutyrate. Is that technically the. The type of ketone that that is?

Yeah, that's beta hydroxybutyra. It does convert pretty quickly. We find in myself and in others and in our animal studies that it converts to acetoacetate. So beta hydroxybutyrate actually needs to convert to acetoacetate to be used in the tissues. And so if you measure the urine, ketone sticks. It's important to know that that's acetoacetate measurement and the blood monitors that people use, that's beta hydroxybutyrate. So what's interesting is that if you get beta hydroxybutyrate elevated with a carbohydrate restricted ketogenic diet, sometimes acetoacetate isn't elevated. But the salts really have elevated my acetoacetate pretty high. I think the point I want to get across is that people have a different ratio of beta hydroxybutyrate to acetoacetate and it varies between 2 to 1 to 5 to 1. Beta hydroxybutyrate to acetoacetate. There's something going on there. Actually I'm interested because acetoacetate seems to have the anti seizure effects. So I'm actually interested in that. I do work with ketone esters which are even a more potent form of these salts here. And although FDA regulations would be problematic for the ones that we're working with because they're pretty potent. But we developed esters of acetoacetate and they have unique properties over a beta hydroxybutyrate, at least when it comes to brain neuroprotection and seizures.

Got it.

That's work that we're working on finding out why that's the case.

And then this other stuff that you mentioned, I just want to make sure I get resources for everybody in the show. Notes. Yeah, the caprylic acid. Yeah. That MCT oil was a source of caprylic acids. But, but if someone wanted, wanted to get caprylic acid, could they just get caprylic acid or, or do they need to buy MCT oil or are those terms kind of synonymous?

Caprylic. So caprylic Acid is an MCT oil. It's 8 carbon triglyceride. If you go to the store right now and buy MCT oil, it'll probably be about 50 to 60%, roughly 50% MCT or caprylic acid. Caprylic acid tends to be the most ketogenic of the MCT oils. To get the highest boost in your beta hydroxybutyrate levels. Pure caprylic acid would be ideal. And that sold. The only place that I know that sells it is Perillo Nutrition. John Perillo is kind of an old company and Captree is the product. And they're kind of low profile. They don't advertise much, but they supply our caprylic acid for our research. And it turns it, it's the one that I use and the one That I favor because I know it's pure caprylic acid. But we also do studies with just MCT because that has an 8 carbon caprylic and also a 10 carbon, which is called capric acid. Some studies have shown that there's a benefit to capric acid for seizures and for other things. It's like you have all these things and you want to test them. So it's like, okay, I'll test mct, but then I have to test a fractured ennated purified for mct. So we're running a variety of studies to really tease out and determine what's optimal. And then you use one dose, Right. And then you're like, okay, well did I use the dose that was optimal? And then you have to go back and do a bunch of doses to figure out where the sweet spot is.

Gotcha. So if somebody wanted to. And I know we're running up against time, but I want to finish up with. With one kind of practical overview for people. Let's say I wanted to maximize my state of ketosis. I'm going to go on like a two to three hour bike ride. So what you're saying is you would begin by drinking a decent amount of water. Like, what do you do, like 20, 30 ounces of water around there? Or like a water bottle full of water?

Yeah, yeah, I kind of get some water in my stomach prior to ingesting the ketones.

And then you would take one to two tablespoons of ketones at that point?

Yeah, I would. A safe bet for a newbie coming into this is to do 15-20 ML of MCT, which would be like a tablespoon, and then an equal amount of the keto force product.

So equal amounts of ketones and MCT oil, basically, I.

From my experiment. Yeah, that's optimal.

And then would you repeat that, like during an actual exercise? Could you repeat that on like an hourly basis or would that just be enough to take you through several hours?

I think about two hours would be optimal under. Yeah. So you could like, redo. That's necessary. Yeah.

Redose with that one tablespoon, like one to one ratio of ketones to MCT oil, like every two hours or so, like during something like a. A long bike ride?

Yep.

Have you found. Have you found that there is a limitation in terms of intensity, like, do you need to keep things aerobic or if you're going to go glycolytic, do you need exogenous sources of carbohydrate or.

Anything like that for Me personally, like I'm, I'm very sedentary actually. I get to the gym maybe once or twice a week and I kind of do some stuff around my house when I don't go to the gym. So I'm not, I don't do a whole lot of. Lately I haven't been doing a whole lot of aerobic activity, but anaerobically. Yeah, I just basically take it on my way to the gym or a couple hours before if I want to. Kind of take advantage of the cognitive effects and work. And I find that your ketones are elevated for two to three to four hours at least after five and six sometimes. And the oil there's different. I think that the MCT oil can delay the gastric emptying so you have elevation of ketones a little bit longer. Branched chain amino acids are another thing that I kind of add into the mix. Personally I think it helps prior to exercise, can delay exercise fatigue and has some anti catabolic effects. That would be the stack that I.

I don't use many supplements. It sounds very similar to the stack that Peter Attia and I kind of developed a stack for me for Ironman Hawaii. It's what I ended up using kind of like during the first half of the bike ride at Ironman Hawaii. It was a stack of branched chain amino acids and MCT oil. He had suggested that I add the ketones into that protocol as well. But my life was so crazy leading into Ironman Hawaii that I didn't have a chance to test out that component. So I never actually added that in. I've got that on the radar in the future, but it worked out great. And then I got to the special needs turnaround where I had a second bottle of MCT oil and branched chain amino acids and everything. And I made a tactical error of allowing that to sit in the heat for about four to five hours while it was waiting for me in my special needs station. And for anybody listening in, MCT oil once it's heated to about 90 degrees or so doesn't taste so good. So I, I ended up switching to to on course nutrition at that point. But for about the first 60 miles or so of the bike ride, yeah, that stuff was like rocket fuel. The combination of branch chain amino acids, like high dose branch chain amino acids with, with MCT oil and I can only imagine if I'd have, if I'd have added ketones into that, the added effect. So this is cool stuff. I really think it's, let's just say it goes Way above and beyond Gatorade, right? Yeah.

Do you take any stimulants, by the way, like caffeine or any, any kind of stimulants I use.

So I use one supplement called X2 Performance, which is, it's a little bit of caffeine which obviously helps to utilize fatty acids a little bit. It's also got some pine T all in there to, to drive substrate into muscle tissue and disodium ATP to top off ATP stores a little bit more quickly. And then I also use oxaloacetate, which helps me to convert lactic acid into glucose more quickly since I'm not taking in much in terms of exogenous sources of glucose.

Where do you get that from, Ben?

I get that from Dave Asprey. It's actually something he markets as an anti aging supplement, but I use it as a. I, I was speaking, speaking with someone at his, his biohacking conference down in San Francisco who kind of gave me an approximate dosage to use it as like a, basically to upregulate the Cori cycle, you know. And so I, so I, I take a few of those prior. And you know, as far as other like supplements go, I mean, I use some other stuff that's not really for ketosis per se, but just for, for general health during the event. Like I take some adaptogenic herbs and you know, rhodiola, cordyceps, stuff like that. But. Yep, but yeah, kind of, kind of the biggies that I toss in to enhance the ketosis effect is oxaloacetate and the X2 performance.

So that's interesting. So that's a TCA cycle intermediate and then you can make a salt of that. So what you're probably taking is a salt of oxaloacetate. Maybe the Benogen I know is they have a trademark on that. But there's other TCA cycle intermediates that you can make a salt or an ester out of. And I think there's a lot of potential there that I'm working on now for actually ALS and some other things. I know the applications are pretty broad.

At some point it would be. That's one thing I do with Pacific Elite Fitness, which is, it's, it's, it's not really a supplement company that I run as much as is like a, a solutions company where I'll take a bunch of things that are meant to like enhance hormones or enhance endurance and kind of just put them all together in a box and ship them to folks. It'd be interesting to kind of develop just like the ultimate cocktail of all this stuff and just order it to my facility and figure out how to ship it out to people as, like, a box. It'd probably be a pretty expensive box, but. But it'd be cool to figure out rather than people having to go to the four corners of the planet to find all this stuff.

But if you train with it. But then there's, you know, you can kind of maybe use it sparingly when you train, and then you just use it for the big event. Something like that.

Yeah, exactly. No, I think it's super cool. Well, man, I could talk to you for hours. And I've got a ton of notes right now in the show notes for people listening in. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com in the show notes for this interview, first of all, put a link to a bunch of the interviews we've done with Peter Attia, because I know Dominique and I kind of dove right in without really explaining ketosis too in depth. And so you may want to go back and listen to some of those interviews. If you want more like an introduction to ketosis, I'll put a link to the other stuff we talked about to that book that Dominique mentioned, and also to Dominique's website over at the University of South Florida. So, yeah, we'll put lots of links in there for you to explore more. And of course, if you have questions, which I would imagine you do, leave them as a comment in the show notes to this podcast and I'll be sure to hop in and answer your questions too. Dominique, man, thank you. That was super cool.

Thank you. Yeah, pleasure being here. You're definitely an innovative guy out there and really pushing the limits of human performance. And I think I could see this as one of the most interesting websites that I came across on performance, human performance. I recommend it to everyone that I know is interested in this topic.

Cool. That's good to hear, man. All right, folks, well, that'll about wrap it up for today, so. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and Dominique d'. Agostino. Hopefully I'm pronouncing your last name Dominique.

Yeah.

Dominic. Yeah. Hey, I like my pronunciation. It sounds more European. Dominique. Anyways, we're signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. have an awesome day.

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