The New Ketone Healthy Alcohol Alternatives - How To Get All The Effects Of Alcohol *Without* Drinking Wine, Beer or Cocktails, With KetoneAid's Frank Llosa.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.

So once it gets into your bloodstream, the ketone ester, the bond breaks apart and you have a readily available beta hydroxybutyrate free acid. And then separately you have R13 butanediol. The R13 butanediol then is a slow release because after multiple passes it goes through the liver and creates ketones. Beta hydroxybutyrate. So you have a fast release and a slow release.

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Well, you may have heard me talking lately about how I've been kind of doing this new thing in the evening as an alcohol alternative. Now don't get me wrong, I still have a glass of red wine. I had one last night. I'm probably down to like three or four glasses of wine maybe max in a week now because I'm now drinking ketones for my evening cocktails. And if you don't know what a ketone cocktail is, don't worry, we'll get into it on today's show. But it's a shockingly close equivalent to the effects, like the socially lubricating kind of like end of the day relaxation effects of alcohol to use certain forms or blends of ketones, namely what are called ketone esters as a cocktail alternative. But if you're wanting to take a break from alcohol or alcohol doesn't agree with you or you don't want to deal with some of the side effects of alcohol, this is kind of like a new hack. Now what I've been drinking are these keto cocktails or like canned keto drinks with flavors like gin and tonic and Moscow mule and pina colada. And they actually taste shockingly close to the real equivalent of those actual cocktails. And the company that makes these drinks I've been consuming is called Ketonade. I wanted to get the guy who's actually invented this stuff on the show to talk all things ketones, but specifically talk a little bit about these ketone esters because I think a lot of people are under the impression because I've podcasts about this in the past, that that ketones are just a performance fuel, like something you'd use for triathlon or marathon for physical performance, because they are very good fuel for the liver and the diaphragm and the heart and the brain and can save you from having to consume a lot of carbohydrates and are a very long term source of energy. The other folks who use a lot of ketones are people who are fasting or who are doing the one meal a day or compressed feeding windows and don't want their appetite driving them crazy during that time because ketones do a really good job kind of shutting down the appetite as well. You may have heard me interview researchers like Dominique d' Agostino, for example, probably being the most prolific about all the other side effects of ketones, like their anti inflammatory potential, the fact that they seem to have some type of effect on the whole longevity and anti aging component of things. But this whole idea of using them as an alcohol alternative is a new thing. And they actually no longer taste like rocket fuel like they used to. They can actually be rendered pretty tasty. So I decided to get this guy who is an entrepreneur who actually created this company, Ketone Aid on the show to talk all things ketone science and alcohol alternatives. Not only that, but I actually have one of the brand new hot off the press ketone beers that he sent to me that we'll do a little bit of a live tasting of maybe as we go along here. I'm not really a beer guy. I haven't had a beer in like probably 10 years. But I actually am gonna give this thing a go during the podcast in real time. So the shownotes for everything that we talk about, including links to these new ketone cocktail alternatives are gonna be at BenGreenfieldLife.com KetoPodcast that's BenGreenfieldLife.com KukoPodcast My guest on today's show is Mr. Frank Llosa. It's spelled with two Ls, right? Frank Llosa? Did I pronounce that right? Yosa.

But unlike Llama, the two Ls is a Y sound.

I nailed it. And I promise I won't call you Frank Llama. How'd you get into all this anyways, man? How'd you get into the world of ketones?

Sure, sure. So it all started with a deep dive that I took a friend of mine, Daniel Odio. He did a blog post on going down the rabbit hole with doing the ketogenic diet. I didn't know what it was. My only experience with it was this one friend of mine. We were about to go out partying and he chugged. He ate a pound of cheese and he was overweight. I said, what in the world are you doing, dude? He's like, I'm losing weight. I'm like, okay, good luck. Good luck with that. And we kind of like, left it there, by the way.

I think that's the old. Like, I think Tim Ferriss is the guy that made that popular. When he was getting in the keto diet, he talked about all he ate was cheese. And I think a lot of people began to associate ketotic diet with basically massive amounts of cheese consumption, which. Which I think backfired on some people, both literally and figuratively.

Yeah. So. So then I went down the rabbit hole and started to learn about ketones. But at the same time, my wife's godfather is Dr. Richard Veach, and he actually was on your podcast. He only did two podcasts before he passed away, and he was on your podcast about five or six years ago.

Yeah.

And this is him right here in the book Ketones the Fourth Fuel.

That's a fantastic. Travis Crispin Ketones the Fourth Fuel.

Yeah.

If you want to take a deeper dive. So I was able to actually converse with him at a birthday party in a way that he's not used to. He's not used to people saying, hey.

What do you do?

And he has to go into this. He doesn't want to go into explaining what ketosis is from scratch. I was able to converse with him. I had some startup experience, and I said, hey, maybe I can help you, you know, raise some money and get this. Get this off the ground. Because he'd been working at the NIH for about 40 years, working on a synthetic way to mimic the benefits of a ketogenic diet in a pill, in a drink form or something. But the pitch went something like this. We think people will drink $60 a day worth of a drink that tastes like vomit. So, like that, you know, compared to all the CBD things that were floating around, like, oh, we'll just. We'll just stick with investing in cbd. Good luck with that. You know, vomit fuel. So then I decided, you know, put my money where my mouth is and ended up, you know, taking two to three years developing a way to get the price down. Because Dave Asprey spent $25,000 for one serving, and one of the first servings, he paid $25,000 for 25 grams of D beta hydroxybutyrate, D13 butanediol ketone ester.

Which is basically what I've got here in this beer.

No, no, no, it's not. We're going to go into that. It's two very. Just very distinct.

Man, you had my hopes up that. I had a $25,000 beer here for a second.

No, no, no, no, no. That was the ketone ester, which we'll talk about the differences between that and what we call Keto Hall. Keto hall is this new ketogenic alcohol alternative. Okay, so the, the ketone. Esther, when we actually sent you some of the first batches five, six years ago, I hadn't even drank it myself because it was five hundred to a thousand dollars each. I'm like, who cares if I could. If I can run around the lab faster, let's go send it to Ben. And that's when you, you know, had the rocket fuel and your ketones skyrocketing.

I think that was the one that I used in the, in the Tough Mudder competition that I. That. That was one of the tough mudders, actually. One, I did a shot of that and a shot of just like fructose melted extra. And so I had both amped up glucose and amped up ketones, which can be a good strategy in some scenarios, such as a race to have both forms of fuel available. But nonetheless, the cost of making these things obviously must have come down, right?

Yeah. So then, you know, we were able to get the cost down to $1 per gram as opposed to a thousand dollars per gram. When. When you pay one scientist to synthetically make, you know, one batch is going to be crazy. So, yeah, we got the price down. And for the next three or four years, we were constantly trying to scale up and meet the demand because the pro Tour de France type world tour athletes started catching on and they would buy huge quantities for their teams and we'd be sold out for our regular customers and having to move things around and work overnight. So for the first three or four years, it was just a matter of keeping up with the demand and trying to make it, and then also simultaneously trying to scale up buying bigger equipment. This isn't something that we just buy from China, like most ketones salts, which we'll get into, you just buy a product and you put in your packaging and you're done. No, we actually own the manufacturing equipment and we actually manufacture it here in the US and it's a very time consuming, expensive process, but we still got the price down to a reasonable rate.

Yeah. So just to back up here for a second, these ketone esters. Can you explain what exactly a ketone ester is?

Yeah. So let's go a little bit higher. So there's this umbrella concept called exogenous ketones.

Right.

And exogenous ketones are when you consume something that is either a ketone itself or it converts very easily to a ketone. So that, as opposed to endogenous ketones, is, is when you are on a ketogenic diet or you're not eating for three or four days, your body will burn fat to make ketones. Right. So we're talking about the umbrella exogenous ketones. Within exogenous ketones. Some people will include MCT oil, like the C8 version of MCT oil, where 10% of it will convert to beta hydroxybutyrate. So you're consuming your ketones. That means you can have rice, you can be putting. Tim Ferriss would do this. He had rice and put C8 on it and technically his ketones would go up. But that's not really ketosis and we'll get into that in a second. It's mimicking ketosis, but it's not real. Doesn't really put you in ketosis when you drink exogenous ketones. So there's MCT, C8, that's an exogenous ketone. There's ketone salts that have been on the market and we'll kind of explain what that is. And then there's ketone ester, which is the most researched of all the exogenous ketones as far as efficacy. All the other companies, they cite the research of the ketone ester, even though they have a different molecule. And they try and say, hey, look, ketones work, but then it's a different molecule. So it's called science hijacking, which we'll get into. And then there's a separate molecule that we call keto Hall. So ketone ester and the keto hall, the R13 butane dial, are related, but two separate molecules. One's for performance and one's for relaxation, which we will get into. It's really, really confusing stuff. So, yeah, the hard ketones, which is the name of that separate company that I make for this after hours alcohol alternative, we call that hard ketones with the ingredient in it called keto hall, which is this R13 butane dial for relaxation purposes.

Okay, so R13 butane dial is a ketone ester and when you consume it's not a ketone ester.

Very confusing. Is absolutely not a ketone ester. So ketone ester, the word ester means a bond of two molecules. Okay, okay. So an ester bond. So the ketone ester is D beta hydroxybutyrate, the free acid form bound to a molecule called R13 butanediol, a separate molecule. And when you bind them together, it actually enters into the bloodstream intact, as opposed to separating in the gut is what they initially thought. It actually enters into the bloodstream intact. So it's more bioavailable than the individual parts. So some companies just poured in the free acid, poured in the R13 and said, hey, good enough, it's 40% less bioavailable when you have it separately. So you put it together, that is the ester. And I asked Dr. Veach. So Dr. Veech explained to me that the ketone ester is a fast release and slow release of ketones. So once it gets into your bloodstream, the ketone ester, the bond breaks apart and you have a readily available beta hydroxybutyrate free acid, okay? And then separately you have R13 butane dial. The R13 butane dial then is a slow release because after multiple passes, it goes through the liver and creates ketones, beta hydroxybutyrate. So you have a fast release and a slow release. So then I asked Dr. Veach, wait a second, the ketone ester is so expensive, why not just give 25% more of the R13 butane dial? And his answer was, because that would in essence convert to BHB at a similar level of the ketone ester. Apart from the way that the ester penetrates more readily, his answer was epic. He said, the mice were stumbling. So the mice were drunk. The mice were stumbling, the mice were drunk. So they first tested this on mice.

Because they had more of, they had more of the 1,3 butane diol.

Only when they only gave them R13 butane dial to see how their cognition was, to see if they're sharper walking through the maze, they fall off the pool.

Whereas if the R13 butane dial was combined with the beta hydroxybutyrate, that's when you get more of like the performance effect, cognitive enhancing effect. But then if you elevate R13 butane dial separately, meaning a non esterified ketone, that's when you get more of like that relaxation, I've just had a couple glasses of wine type of effect, right?

So it's more of a buzz, I would say, you know, someone might say, well, the ketone ester technically has alcohol in it because it has this half that's R13, but the numbers aren't the same. So the ketone ester, what we call a serving, this is our ke4, our main drink, which is 50% ketone. Ester, it was so strong that people started using one cap full. So you're used to drinking the entire bottle, but people started using the cap as a measuring tool. So we changed that to a serving size. So for the ketone ester, it's so strong that people are using 2.5 grams of ketone ester, which means it's only 1.25 R13 butanedal, a tiny, tiny amount. One serving of our hard seltzers, which we'll get into, is 12.5 grams of R13. And most people to feel the buzz will have to take two of them. So we're talking 25 grams direct consumption of a fast hitting R13 butane dial versus 1.25 grams as part of an ester. It's just night and day difference. So.

Okay.

It doesn't give you that intoxicating or that, that buzz effect that drinking it directly alone without this, you know, esterification having to break apart and just hitting, hitting you quicker.

Admittedly, I've never actually had two. You're saying like if you have two, you. You definitely feel it even more?

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So depending on your tolerance, some people won't feel too. If they have a super high tolerance because of regular ethanol consumption, they drink 2 to 5.

I'm a total lightweight with alcohol anyways because I rarely drink more than one serving of alcohol anyway, so I've never really even thought about having a couple. Maybe I'll try it now just to see. I want to make sure I adhere to my own values of temperance and sobriety. But it actually would be interesting to. To.

I wouldn't recommend it for servings. I wouldn't recommend it for the podcast. I mean, you can take a sip of that beer that I sent you. So you're be the first person to have the prototype of the beer. But you know, Tim Ferriss, when he was talking about using it, he said that he would slur his words and bump in the tables and get loopy.

Interesting.

That isn't what, that isn't what you want to take for your college entrance exams, right? Unless. Unless you have super high anxiety and your alternative is taking a shot of whiskey.

Okay, maybe, you know, no, I've never experienced that with having one. Like I've drank that canned pina colada that you just held up. And by the way, we are doing this as a video. So if anybody goes to BenGreenfieldLife.com KetonePodcast you can see the video. I've had probably 50 of these drinks over the past year, always one at a time. I've had the pina colada, I've had the gin and tonic and the mule. And I find it's about the equivalent of having a glass of wine for me to go through one serving, and I've never had two just because I rarely would drink two glasses of wine. And that's just me. But not to make this too complex, but I want to ask you one other thing to clear the air on the chemistry of this. There's also another term that's thrown around out there of a ketone salt. What would be the difference between the ketone salt, the ketone ester, and then this isolated 13 butane dial that you'd get in the alcoholic beverage or the alcohol mimicking beverage, I should say.

Yeah. So this, the ketone salt is a bond of the same free acid of beta hydroxybutyrate, but if you consumed it by itself, it would burn a hole in your gut. The PH is too low. So then the solution to that is adding a mineral, a salt to that. So you add either sodium, potassium, magnesium, or calcium, either one of the four. Sometimes they say sodium free, and all they do is ramp up the other ones. But there's, you know, diminish. There's some negatives of having each one of those four minerals too high. If you have too much magnesium, you're going to get the runs. Too much sodium, not good for the heart. So all these different things, and the sodium load or the salt load in these products are so huge that if you wanted to take mega doses, larger amounts of, you know, compared to the ketone ester, if someone wanted to take a full bottle of ketone ester, if they wanted to try to mimic that in a ketone salt form, it'd be like consuming half of a restaurant shaker of salt.

Okay.

I mean, I'm all for salt. I wake up with salt pills, like, no big deal. But to have half of a restaurant shaker of salt is just, the salt load is too high. And Dr. Veach, he had ketone salts 15, 20 years ago. He literally tossed them in the trash. And he said, you know, your cardiologist would kill me if I, if I put this out on the market because the salt is too high.

I gotcha. So if you wanted to use ketone salts to get your blood ketones elevated, you would have that side effect of having to consume so many salts that there would be some deleterious side effects.

Right. And even the, the salt itself will block. Could Block ketone just utilization as well. So, like the salt just harms everything at these super, super high levels. Okay. And then the other problem with many ketone salts, but not all of them, but most of them that are just on Amazon, is that they're the racemic form, which means that only half of it is bioavailable. You might have seen supplements like L tryptophan or D ribose. They have the L of the D. The L or the D1 isn't necessarily better than the other. But for that molecule, the D form is what the body recognizes, or the L form might be what the body recognizes. So the ketone salts, they have the good form and the bad form, but that is relative. The, the form that can be, that can create energy and then the other form that the body doesn't know what to do with, some people say that there's potential benefits because the body doesn't know what to do with it. It stays around longer. So potential, but that hasn't been, that hasn't been flushed out. Dr. Veach on your podcast six, seven years ago said he wouldn't touch the racemic ketone salts with a 15 foot pole. Okay. He was really against racemic because it's just not what the body's designed to use. So that's. So the other problem with the ketone salts are some people think that they're, you know, I'm going to get into the ketogenic diet and I'm going to use ketone salts. And they feel, oh, it really helped me get over the keto flu and stuff like that. These, these problems that you have when you enter the ketogenic diet. But what I think they're really feeling is the salt load. So when you enter into a ketogenic diet, you need to get bone broth, bouillon cubes. You got to really get your salt up because you lose so much water weight that all this salt goes out of your system. So then people buy these ketone salts and they think that they're feeling the ketones, but they're really just feeling the salt. And they could save a lot of money just by using salt.

Yeah, like calcium, sodium, potassium, et cetera. So not to throw anybody under the bus, we don't have to name brands here. But I had a smoothie this morning, and in the smoothie I put a scoop of a product that says it has base BHB salts in it. Sodium beta hydroxybutyrate, calcium beta hydroxybutyrate, and magnesium beta hydroxybutyrate and then like stevia and monk fruit were the main things on the label of this powder that I put into my smoothie. Was that an example of a ketone salt that for me to really, truly get the effects of ketosis, I would have to consume so much of that I'd be getting too much of that. Calcium, magnesium and sodium, potentially kind of.

And most likely that was racemic because it would go out of its way to scream because it costs three, four times more money to have the non racemic form that it would be all over the bottle, bio available or stuff like that.

I'm looking at the label of it right now. It says beta hydroxybutyrate ketone supplement, exogenous ketones. And what I just told you is what was on the label like calcium, magnesium and sodium beta hydroxybutyrate. What would the people who make a product like that say in response? I mean, is this just a deal where they're kind of creating a product that kind of sort of looks like ketones but isn't or that or like what's the argument against what your, what you're saying?

Well, yeah, they would, they would say that. Well, they would say it's less expensive, that's one thing. But then we'll go into that. The ketone ester actually is less expensive than many of these products on a cost per gram basis. So it's not our fault that you can take 20, 30 times more. So when you actually break it down to the cost benefit, so your bottle, does it say in the back like 10 grams in the nutritional facts, Sometimes they hide it in a proprietary formula. So they'll say 15 grams.

It says 3,800 milligrams calcium beta hydroxybutyrate, 3,800 milligrams sodium beta hydroxybutyrate and 3,800 milligrams magnesium BHB. That's what's on the label.

Okay, so that is racemic almost definitely because they would have gone out of their way to say R beta hydroxybutyrate. And then 20% of it, they count the weight of the salt. So let's say it all adds up to 10. It's actually 8 grams of ketones. But then the bioavailability, because only half of it is bioavailable. It's like four grams of ketones. And then the excess salt load blocks the ability for the ketones to be used. Then you're down to three. And do you go down to two again because the ketone ester enters into the bloodstream. So on a gram per gram basis, it is 40% higher than the free acid by itself. So if you drink 10 grams of the free acid versus 10 grams of the ketone ester, your blood ketones go up 40%. So people think that it's less expensive. It probably tastes better than our KE40.

It tastes amazing. It's salted caramel flavor. It tasted really good.

Yeah, yeah. You would not want to put ketone ester into a smoothie. So first of all, we always recommend taking it fasted. It just really exponentiates, I don't know if that's the right word. It really multiplies the benefit. If you're already fasted, you take it. Absolutely. You get the blood glucose spike and it kind of interferes. And people might say, oh, the body prefers ketones. Sure. In the absence of glucose coming in and wrecking the party and saying, oh, we want you to, you know, we want you to be the kindling. We want you to burn the kindling first, the glucose as opposed to the slow burning coal. So if you mix them together in a smoothie, I think it's, you don't get as much benefit. The other huge difference with the ketone salts is 80% of them will put in caffeine into the drinks. So people think that they're feeling this, these ketones, but they're really just feeling the caffeine and the ketones. Even a small amount will multiply and increase the delivery of the caffeine. So you think that it's only 80 milligrams. You say, oh, I'm used to a cup of coffee, but it might be double that. Again, you think you're feeling it. So if you're gonna play with the ketone salts. Absolutely. Well, absolutely. Get caffeine free. So you're isolating the variables and then, you know, get the non racemic form. And at that point it's kind of.

Funny that the label on this formula is telling about. It says we use the highest quality racemic beta hydroxybutyrate salts. Ideally it should be non racemic.

Well, yeah, but you know, that's, that's marketing. They're admitting that it's racemic and then, you know, highest quality racemic. I mean, racemic is not, is also not plant based by nature. When something is plant based, it sticks with the nature's form, the D form, for example. But when it's synthetic, that's when they make the D and the L form. And it's just marketing spin and trying to say, trying to. I'm surprised it says the word racemic, but saying the highest quality. Racemic. Yeah. It's like saying the highest quality of this local. This is the best Yugo car out there.

In their defense, maybe the copywriter wasn't a chemist. Okay, so these salts though, and a lot of the ketone products, products out there are powdered. You know, you add them to a smoothie, whatever. Are the esters always liquid?

Yeah, so the esters are always liquid. We can powderize it, but then you have to add three times more material on the outside to powderize it. It makes it, you know, not worth it.

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Okay, now speaking of liquids, you talked about your ketone ester shot. This is the one that like if I drink it at the beginning of the day, I'm too much of a foodie to do like the three to five day fast things. But I don't think about food at all. It's, it's crazy. Like you just don't even like if, if you want to eat, it's not because you're hungry, it's because you're bored. Basically is, you know, when you have this stuff in your system, what's in the. I want to get to the alcohol in a second. But from what I understand, these shots that you guys also have at Ketone Aid, those aren't supposed to mimic alcohol. That's more the thing you'd use for fasting performance, et cetera. What's in that? This KE4 shot?

Yeah, so the KE4 is 50% ketone ester. So it's that beta hydroxybutyrate bound to R1.3 butane dial. So it's 50% and then 50%.

So exactly what you were describing earlier.

And no sugar, no carbs and okay, different people. If you take as much as you probably have taken some people, if you take too much of the ketone ester, it actually lowers your blood sugar too much and actually increases hunger. Yeah, it can make you more hungry. But some people, their bodies are more adaptable, more fat adapted. They can take more or you can do it. Our other product, which is the ketone water, which is a 1%.

This is amazing by the way. I keep that in the fridge and I've been drinking that instead of sparkling water because the whole cans like 14 calories. Now what were you saying is in that, the sparkling water?

So that's 1% of the ketone ester. So the same stuff as this, but our minimum effective dose, which is one capsule we just dumped it into a ketone water and it doesn't really. The KE4. We have protocols when to take it. Do you take a pre workout, post workout before bed, like different ways? The ketone water, there's no protocol. You just. When would you grab a sparkling water? You grab this and it tastes like a regular low sweetness.

Yeah, it's amazing. When you first sent that to me, I'm like, oh, like, this is my new Pellegrino. Because you get, you get that flavor. You got a black cherry and orange vanilla. And I think there's one other flavor, isn't there? Basin.

We have a black cherry and orange vanilla of the ketone water.

Just those two flavors. Yeah, but. But it kind of has a little bit of that appetite satiating effect that goes over and above what you get from sparkling water. But you're saying that's just kind of like feather dusted with a little bit of the. Of the 1,3 butane dial beta hydroxybutyrate bound together as the ketone ester.

Yeah. If your first experience is the ketone water and you're looking for, like to rock it to the moon, like, you're not going to notice it. It's more people who have used the ketone, the KE4, and they understand the dosing and what it does to you, and they're like, oh, I'd rather have a better tasting version than this.

It's obviously cheaper still.

Kind of rocket fuel. Yeah, it's actually less expensive on a. It's more expensive on a cost per gram basis. So you've got to be looking at, yes, this is a $30 bottle and this is, you know, four or five dollars can. But on a cost per gram basis of ketones, the KE4 is always the least expensive.

But you don't drink a whole bottle of the KE4 necessarily, because three bottles of the K4, that's like a $90 box. The ketone water, again, eight pack for 40 bucks. But those three little bottles that come in, in that box, what is it, like a fourth of those? I think like, like a quarter of it would be a dose.

So initially Dr. Veach wanted people to take two to three bottles of this a day. That was the $60 tasting like vomit pitch. And he thought that people wouldn't change their diet at all. They're going to go to McDonald's and they're going to eat their, you know, drink their ketones at the same time. But what we found over time is that less and less works. So now we're down to 12 servings in one bottle. So much so that the cap, literally the cap became the 5mL measuring and people will take, yeah, 12 of.

I have to admit, when I, when I go through security at the airport and then I take one of those out of my bags, if I'm going a long haul flight, I just slam the whole bottle just because I know about all the anti inflammatory and cellular protective effects of ketones. I don't want to think about food on the plane and I'll just blast through a long haul flight just having drank the whole bottle. But technically I could just drink a capful, 1/12 of it and still get some of the effects of, of ketosis.

And if you're doing long flights, people have used it for jet lag. There's some doctors that actually only use it for their flights. And every two hours they take one capful every two hours on a 16, 20 hour flight. And I tell them not to eat on the flight as well because the bad food, the glucose spiking and just the radiation protection effect, which was one of Dr. Veach's passions. When you land, you take another five mls and people just aren't feeling any jet lag after 20 hour flights. And especially if you're an elite athlete having to fly across the world to compete and it affects you much less. That helps a lot.

Now is the reason that you guys have one other product then I want to shift to alcohol and talk about alcohol for a little bit because this is what initially made me want to get you on the show because I'm like more people got to know about this way to get all the effects of alcohol without actually drinking alcohol. But is the reason that you have this other product that's like a blend of a ketone ester and a ketone salt, which is the ke1 instead of the ke4, which is the pure ester, just to allow for people to be able to get that at a better price. Or why do you have that, that last one? That's the blend of the ketone ester and ketone salt.

Yeah. So the KE1 is all about taste. It says six times more water and the equivalent of, well, what we call somewhat of the equivalent of two capfuls of KE4. So people would drink half of a bottle, would be one serving. And what we did here was we had 60% ketone ester, 60% ketone ester, 20% ketone free acid, which by itself you can't consume because the ph would be too low, burns a hole in your gut doesn't penetrate in as well as the ketone ester. And then 20% ketone salt, just the D form. So the total salt load is still 80 to 90% less than a ketone salt. But the mixture of all of them. What happens is if we just did the ketone ester, which is what I'd like to get to, it just the taste isn't there yet. So for people, sometimes elderly people will take it for energy and mental clarity. It just. The KE4 is too rough. Even diluted, it just isn't good. The KE one, when you have 60% as opposed to 100% and then the free acid actually counters the ester flavor together. It works and tastes like. It tastes great.

But it's a little. For me, I never really cared about flavor that much. I mean, I'll just dump powders of this and powder that in my mouth. So. So the KE1 never really resonated with me that much because I didn't really care if it didn't taste that great. Although I have to admit with the alcohol drinks, I'm more picky if something says gin and tonic on it. I want to taste like gin and tonic or Moscow mule or pina colada or whatever. But if I'm just going for the pure performance metrics or cognitive enhancing benefits, I don't care about the flavor. So I'm full on that ke4 instead.

Of the ke1 1 benefit for someone like you still might be to slow release it into a water bottle. So if you have a half a liter water bottle that you're drinking in a tennis match and you're going to be drinking every few minutes, having a KE4 diluted is going to be pretty nasty. And you might not care about the taste once. Okay, but if you're doing a multi five hour cycling ride, you don't want. Nasty, nasty, nasty. This one tastes like a.

That makes sense. Like if I was, if I was still doing Ironman, you know, because back in the day when I was doing Ironman, the ketones had barely hit the street. So I was using MCT oil because I was doing a lot of the ketosis experimentation during Ironman. And you know, MCT oil, even that just tasted nasty after a while. But, but what I would have used if it had been available would have been that KE1, right. Instead of the, the MCT oil or.

Our other product, which is the snake water.

Yeah, I didn't mention that. But that, that's, that stuff's a whole different level. You just Took the ketones and combined it with a bunch of Y stimulants.

We took the KE one actually, no stimulants. I'm anti stimulants and antiquity, you know what I mean?

Like Huperzine and theanine and teacrine. Like that thing packs a wallop, I have to admit. Like, I've got all sorts of different energy drinks that companies send me. I haven't even talked about Snake Water before on the podcast. But you basically took the ketones, the ketone esters and ketone salts and combined them with what else in there? Theocrine, theanine.

It has T cream, dynamine, l Carnitine, Huperzine, B12, CoQ10, like a super high end CoQ10, Taurine Cordyceps. Again a super high cordyceps, Beta alanine. Just the kitchen, the kitchen sink approach on that one. So that's the one that we then made a 12 ounce version. And that is to try to rival the Monster Energy Red Bull but with no caffeine. So it's very rare to have no sugar and no caffeine drink. That still gives you a similar effect with.

I know. I think people probably get tired of me talking about energy drinks because they get confused. Like I've talked about like the, the drink update energy drink and, and feel free and yeah, there's a lot of options out there. I understand. And if you walk into my garage, you, you've basically got like eight different options. But that Snake Water stuff, I have to admit, like in terms of the combination of the ketones and the energy drinks, in the past, what I've done is I'll take some of your KE4 and have a little bit of that and then combine it with like a feel free or an update or something like that if I want to kick in the pants, you know, the afternoon slump or something. But that Snake Water, it's pretty convenient. I actually like that canned sparkling beverage version versus like the more concentrated shots that you guys, that you guys have.

The shots are better for that Ironman. So if you're doing that Ironman or even a workout where you don't want carbonation. I've seen people with a Red Bull at a gym. I was like, oh, I didn't know people took carbonated drinks. So it's more of a work environment. When you would normally drink a Red Bull, you would grab this, this instead. It also has one other ingredient. It has isomaltilose, a slow carbohydrate, so it won't spike your Blood glucose. And the idea behind the isomaltilose is that if you take too much ketones, it can drop your blood sugar and impair performance. So this gives it a little bit of a floor so that you don't go down and start having the negative effects. So it's a little bit better for higher cardio type workouts. And the concentrate will dilute really well. But the 12 ounce is very sweet. It's not like the ketone water. The ketone water is like any other sparkling water out there. The snake water is more definitely sweeter and more along the lines of like a, these energy drinks that are, that are out there. But it's also very different than you mentioned the Kratom, it doesn't have the potential certain people that might have an addictive personality.

That's the big problem with Kratom. Even with that feel free energy drink. I tell people, dude, check yourself if you find yourself craving it. If you, Even the people that frequently drink Kratom like in the Philippines and southeastern Asia, they talk about how these folks will just like go for years on this stuff. They still do take breaks from it because of that opioid like effect. You do need to be careful. Like, don't get me wrong, I love that feel free stuff. But you know, I'll talk to people and they're like, yeah, I drink three or four a day. I'm like, yeah, you're addicted. Like, like, you know, you, you, any of these energy drinks. Like my metric is if I stop drinking it and feel like I have to come back and have it again, then I, I basically will just quit cold turkey and go through whatever withdrawal issues that, that go along with that. But I've been like that for years. Even with coffee. Like I, I, for a while coffee was my only energy drink and I would still switch to decaf for one week out of every month just to reset my, my receptors and keep myself sensitized to the caffeine and also to make sure I didn't have an attachment for anything. Like my rule is if you drop me off on a desert island and I don't have any of my inner drinks or my energy drinks or my supplements, that my head's not going to explode because I don't have this or that. So I'm constantly just like. And I, I use travel a lot for that. You know, I'll travel and I'll just say, nope, not gonna take that, not gonna take that. And if it's at home, I just don't even have it around. So. All right, let's. Let's talk alcohol. So, first of all, this is going to be fun and condition to the video. I want to kick off our discussion about keto haul, even though we've already covered some of it by trying this new beer. Now, obviously, this stuff is not yet available to the market, so what I'm doing is going to be different than what people would be experiencing because it's all going to be packaged together. But you sent me this. This can, and I know that this is totally just like a. Whatever you'd call it, like. Like a beta. So I've got one 13ml vial of R13. I'm going to open it up here. So this is just pure R13 butane.

Dial with some flavoring with some.

With some flavor.

So you're gonna add that. You're gonna add that to a glass.

Okay. So I'm gonna open up now when you actually bring it. Just one, right?

Yeah.

Okay. So when you bring this to production, you would have the. This combined with this.

Yeah, it'd be in the can, ready to go.

So I basically open this. I'm gonna pour this into my glass.

Yeah.

Told you.

It's been like 10 years since I've had a beer, so I'm probably, like, the worst test audience ever for this, but I'm gonna do it anyways. I do remember what beer tastes like. What. What. What were you trying to nail, like a Michelob or.

Yeah, exactly. Michelob Ultra. So we have to be low carb, too.

So this would be like, I'm going to the football game in the afternoon. I want to drink with all my buddies, but I don't want the alcohol. Okay. So I'm pouring all this in here. See, now I'm glad we're doing the video podcast because he said, make sure it's cold, which it is. I just took this out of the fridge. Okay. I'm gonna swirl it around a little bit. I got this giant, like, wine glass. Not exactly a beer mug, but whatever.

Yeah. All right. It should already mix because you put the. The liquid, the.

My gosh, dude, you just took me back to college. Holy cow.

Like, it's fine. I mean, that's like beer. It's not going to go to the beer, you know, festival and win the gold award.

But this. This. It reminds me when you sent me the champagne. I didn't mention you guys had champagne. And I drank it and told my wife. I'm like, there's no way. This isn't champagne. And it, like, it nailed the flavor. Pretty close. Like, this is pretty good, man.

Yeah. So we're not gonna drink the whole.

Thing, obviously, just because, yeah, it's a. It's the middle of the morning, but holy cow, that tastes like beer.

Yeah.

Wow.

Tastes like beer. And it will. We have to. We're gonna start off by making it also low carb, because I could make a full bodied, you know, experience beer, but then it's gonna have 20 grams of sugar and just all these calories. So it's just a low carb beer with this keto hall.

How many. If I were to drink this entire thing, how many calories are actually in this?

That'd be 75. So that's exactly the same, actually. No, no, no. The other seltzers are 75 calories. And that's just the keto hall. Just the R13 butane dial. The beer is going to have an extra 25 on top of that.

So all the calories are coming from ketones.

75 out of the hundred would come from the keto hall. Whereas our other beverages only have stevia and monk fruit that they don't have any other calories other than what comes from the keto hall.

Okay, now, I don't want you to have to totally give away your secret sauce. No pressure here. But how did you actually get the flavors, like, so close? Like when I drink the Moscow Mule, why does it taste so close to a Moscow Mule?

So we tried several flavor houses and had them try to send us stuff, and it just didn't work. So we brought it in house. So the same place that we manufacture it, we have a full time person. All they're doing eight hours a day is trying to tinker with all these different flavor options to see if they can get it to match a G and T or the champs. And the champs, which is a champagne alternative, is like a hint of champagne. We're actually working on getting full on de alkalized real champagne and then putting in the R13. So it's actually going to be another level versus what you've tried before. And also wine, actually this molecule, for 20 years in the racemic form has been a grape flavoring molecule. So it enhances grape flavoring. So when I tried it in red wine that was low sugar and de alkalized, it actually tasted better than the red wine that was the alkalized. It made it thicker, fuller, and the mouthfeel, it increased the grape. So we have a big roadmap of different drinks that we could be Making with this all to mimic regular alcohol.

Okay, what happens if I were to have one of these and also have a cocktail or have alcohol? Yes. No. Danger. Chemical explosion. Like what would actually occur.

What we've. What we've.

Let me.

If. Can I back up real fast and explain real quick this. You know how this compares to ethanol? Because. Yeah, because so ethanol people. I find that 70% of the public doesn't understand or didn't know that ethanol is the base molecule in alcohol. They kind of assume beer and vodka are different alcohols. No, when you distill them all, they're all ethanol. So that's the first foundational concept that people need to understand that for the last 2,000 years, the only thing that humans could drink is ethanol. This is a ketogenic, and one can call it an alcohol. I have a quote here from Dom D', Agostino, who says that they were researching this 13 butane dial in NASA in the 60s and 70s in the racemic form, and they didn't really know what to call was not an alcohol. It was a glycol or a diol. So depending on the chemistry of how you look at it, is it an alcohol? You know, not in the traditional sense. Of 70% of Americans that think of ethanol and alcohol, some people say, oh, I don't drink. And I say, oh, yeah, you don't drink ethanol. This is not ethanol. It's just drastically different. And ethanol converts to acetaldehyde. That is the toxin that ruins your liver, gives you cravings, gives you all this, the negative effects and wanting more in addictions.

Right. This is when a guy like, who was Dr. Andrew Huberman blew up the Internet when he did the whole podcast recently about alcohol. And a whole bunch of people quit drinking alcohol after that. The main issue with what he was talking about was the actual acetaldehyde.

Yep, exactly. And this. And so Asians, 30% of Asians will actually get red face. It's called Asian Flush or Asian Glow because of the acetaldehyde. They'll drink two or three cans of ours and they will get zero Asian Flush because there's no acetaldehyde. So if we invented something that went from that, you consumed it and it converted. If we invented an alcohol that converted to water, it would be like the Star Trek synthol. And in the Star Trek they invented, Scotty was drinking some whiskey and he spits it out. He goes, what is this? And he's like, this is Synthehal. We've invented a new form of alcohol that is less toxic. So if we had just done that, it'd be like synthehal Star Trek stuff. But this is actually one step better. So not only does it not create acetyl aldehyde, it doesn't create something neutral like water. It actually creates something beneficial. It converts to ketones. So you get the buzz with the benefits. And, and it is a real buzz too. It's not, you know, some products, you might take some kava and maybe notice something here. Like we say, if you don't feel the buzz, it's free. So, you know, if you don't feel it, you don't like it, we just refund you.

But one of our podcast listeners is going to drink it and get plastered and oh, so and so.

Well, that's why.

Give me my money back, bro.

That's part of the reason why we have 12 ounce cans. We want you to drink, you know, the entire thing. We don't want to have shots of that and have people misusing it. We do say limit three on the, on the can, and we don't want it to be abused. This is not a party get wasted type drink. This is a relaxation.

No, that's not my jam anyways. Yeah, I just like the idea of being able to relax at the end of the day and to have something with dinner besides just water. Like, it's nice to have that kind of palate cleanser and something fun to drink. And it, I mean, it works surprisingly well. I'll even like squeeze a little bit of lemon or lime into it and it's amazing. So back to my initial question that got you down that chemical rabbit hole, though. What would happen if I did have like, you know, one of these and then a glass of wine, for example?

Right, right. So we found that with regular ketone ester, the other molecule, the KE4, when people have taken that at the same time as alcohol, they felt in the morning like their one glass of wine felt like two glasses of wine. It was kind of like the caffeine. The ketones increase the caffeine potency. So it might do that. For people who might have not only the ketone ester, but might have this keto hall with it, it might increase the alcohol. However, we've had people that say, hey, normally I go out and I'll have, I'll decide this weekend it's going to be a bender. Three to four bottles of wine a night. They drink two or three of our drink during that time, and then they find themselves they only drank one bottle of wine. Instead of the three or four, and then they wake up much better. So the ketones in this or the keto hall that converts the ketones makes people feel more full. So you actually don't feel as inclined to grab another one where beer. You have one sip of beer, and there's this visceral feeling to have.

Yeah, exactly. Alcohol makes you want to eat more, Whereas that's. That's the other cool side effect of this is because it has the ketones in it. I can have this with dinner, finish dinner, and not feel like I gotta have dessert. Because it's appetite satiated.

Yes. And some people actually use it instead of dinner. Like, they just flat out, hey, I'm just not hungry. I don't want to eat. No big deal. And the beer munchies is also a big part of people's withdrawal symptoms. Not only that they had two or three beers, it's in the garbage that they ate after it because they got the munchies. This. You get no munchies.

The other thing is that a lot of people especially. What's the recent tread? It's like the. No masturbation, no alcohol. It's like this new trendy thing. It's Fatima. I'm blanking. I'm sure somebody's screaming through the podcast, trying to remind me what the word is. But anyway, so people are giving up alcohol, giving up porn, giving up masturbation. It's kind of like this trend. But I have noticed increasingly a lot of those people, they're smoking weed like that. They're like, okay, I don't have any of these things, so I'm gonna have weed. That's the other nice thing about this is you get that relaxing, socially lubricating effect, but you also don't get some of the. Well, essentially what THC is doing to the neural mitochondria is it's causing a free radical leakage that essentially starts to destroy brain cells and make you stupid. And whereas I understand if you're like a musician or an artist and a little bit of marijuana helps you with your creativity or you have some pain that you have to manage, I think it's fantastic for that. But, I mean, gosh, if you're quitting alcohol but picking up weed as a substitute for alcohol, I'd much rather someone pick up ketones than weed, you know?

Well, yeah, with Dry January, you know, we said that it was Dry January compliant, and people say, oh, well. But it's, you know, is it technically alcohol? Is it not? The Dry January goal is to get people off of ethanol for sure. And you know, but if you're getting off of everything, if you're getting off of ethanol and you're not, you stopped smoking and you stopped, you know, caffeine, you went clean. Okay, great, then maybe, you know, you shouldn't take the hard ketones. But if you're still doing all those other stimulants, you know, this is, yeah, ten times better than the ethanol. And that's really the goal is getting off of ethanol.

Yeah. By the way, I think it's nom. Nom. No. No booze, no masturbation. I think that was the, the, the acronym I was, I was looking for. But yeah, like the nom. NOM people are smoking a lot of weed basically, is what, what it comes down to, at least that. That's my experience. Now in terms of sleep architecture, though, obviously we know you get that surge of gamma aminobutyric acid, the inhibitory neurotransmitter, it peaks and then it wears off at like 1 or 2am and the rest of your night of sleep, you get, well, you get good sleep latency, you fall asleep quickly. But then the actual overall sleep architecture, deep sleep score and restfulness score tends to be pretty crappy. Have you guys looked into sleep architecture much with these ketone alcohol alternatives?

Yeah, we have not done actual clinical trials. So what we're going by is oura ring data of our customers and just the trends. And what we find is that one can actually improves people's sleep over just regular water, like just versus their neutral base. They're getting more deep sleep. And we also had found that with the ketone ester, if they take half of a capful to one capful immediately before bed, they're seeing 30 minutes more deep sleep. So Mike Mutzle's oura ring data was flat all week and then suddenly it just shot up. The day he had ketone ester and then back down, you know, the other days. So one can of the hard ketones tends to improve people's sleep. Once you get to two or three cans, then it's going to be, you know, it can start showing up on your oura ring a little bit. So one person sent us data saying, here's two shots of vodka one night and their oura ring data was 35. And then he said, here's two cans of your drink and it was 75. Now his baseline might have been 80, 82, but just drastically, you know, drastically different than, than ethanol. But yeah, it'll have some diminishing returns over a certain quantity. And we do pretty much say that it's no hangover, but someone can always overdo it and challenge that. And I do recommend drinking water before bed because it does have a little bit of a kind of almost like the ketogenic diet, you lose a lot of water weight. So drinking water right before bed will help that as well.

Yeah. I haven't done a whole lot of precise self quantification with the keto haul drinks, but when I was first starting to experiment with the KE4, the full ketone esters that you were sending to me, that resulted in an improvement overall in sleep architecture. And so just this idea of going to bed in a state of ketosis seems to be something that works, at least for myself and for a lot of people when it comes to enhanced sleep architecture.

Yeah, if you take too much of it, though, it'll ruin your sleep. So there's some protocols that we have online that if you're an elite athlete doing a five hour cycling event, they'll take half of a bottle, sometimes a full bottle. But I hesitate mentioning that because.

You mean of the KE4.

Of the KE4, they'll take half to even a full. And it's just way, way too much for me. If I'm already in ketosis because I'm keto vegan for the last seven or eight years, I can only take half of a capful because it has a cumulative effect. I already have a baseline of ketones. If you take too much, my wife, she goes in and out of keto, and I came up one day, she's like reorganizing in the closet. I said, what happened? She's like, oh, I took too much of the ketones before bed. It kind of kicked into this energy source as opposed to a signaling molecule. So too much will ruin your sleep, but you have to find that right amount. But one third of our Amazon reviews are, oh, my goodness. For sleep. I woke up with a cell phone on my chest. And normally I wake up two or three times. Sorry. I went to sleep with the cell phone on my chest. Normally I wake up two to three times a pee. I woke up eight hours later and I was. The cell phone is still in my chest. Not only did they not wake up, they didn't roll around and they just, you know, they were 30 minutes more deep sleep.

But then too much. You get the crack cocaine effect. I want to go vacuum the whole house. Okay, noted. So possibly a little bit of a controversial question here, but this is something I'VE kind of wondered, because when I'm looking at labels, I've seen that this same R13 butane dial, when added or taken as a supplement, seems to be marketed in some other categories. Because from what I understand, you don't hold a patent on this. And there's other companies that are marketing this same molecule, but marketing it as a performance enhancer, which is kind of a head scratcher for me, because I'm asking myself, well, which is it? Is it an alcohol substitute that makes you a little groggy and relaxed and socially lubricated, or is it a performance enhancer? Like you said, the mice were stumbling. So that's one thing to bear in mind. But I wasn't sure if it's like the amount is different, if they're mixing other things in there to make it so it's not alcoholic. What's the deal with the confusion around what 13 butanediol actually is enhancing performance or serving as an alcohol substitute or both?

Sure, sure. So, great, great question. And it is confusing now that we've explained that the ketone ester is drastically different than the R13, now that we've separated the two, we can kind of talk about it. Yeah, there are some companies that. There's one company that had the ketone ester and they, for whatever reason, undisclosed. They lost the rights to the ketone ester, but then they got a $6 million contract for ketone ester, for hypoxia, for the military to figure out how to use the ketone ester. So if you lose the rights to sell ketone ester, and here you are with $6 million, you better start. And venture capital funding, you better start doing some spin. So then what they did is they said, let's go out into the marketplace. Let's see if we can find another molecule that's not a ketone salt that's readily done. Let's see if we can find the next best thing and then just call it 2.0 new and improved. So they scoured the Internet and they found the R13 butane dial. And by the way, we do have a patent pending on it, which should close in a few months. So we do, you know, there is protection there. But. So then they found R13 butane dial and they looked at, oh, look, it raises the blood ketone levels the same way. You might have to take 40% more of it, but it's just far beyond what the ketone salts. And the salts have the sodium limiting factor. So here you could just take A little bit more. And they had 25 grams per serving of the ketone ester, but then they cut it back to 10 grams per serving. Well, why do they do that? Because they know that you'll be, you know, wasted at the 25 is what I think. But so they had this $25 million contract, and they put on their website, we were given $6 million to review exogenous ketones. That is a correct statement, but it's implying that the $6 million was for this molecule. That research was done for this molecule. No, that $6 million was for ketone ester. Don't, you know, don't be tricked by it. Then they cite all these clinical trials saying, look, ketones are great for performance. Which papers are they citing? Ketone ester papers. And they're doing this science hijacking, saying, look, we can get your ketones to 1 millimolar. That paper was 1 millimolar. Therefore, it's the same benefit. And they even sponsored a presentation where they talked about ketone ester for hypoxia, the military study. And at the end, they said, but because it tasted so bad and cost so much, we came out with the version 2.0. And then I asked at the end, I said to the people that did not work for the company, can you just assume that one product that goes up one millimolar is the same as another product that goes up 1 millimolar? Is it all the same if your blood ketone levels are the same? And they said, absolutely not. And Dr. Veech, I've got a video that I just put on YouTube last night, talks about how C8MCT oil, it'll get you to 1 millimolar, but it doesn't work. And it doesn't work because 80 to 90% of it, I think he said, is burned up in the mitochondria, which reduces Q and destroys the ability to increase energy. So you still have the 1 millimolar, but it's not the same thing. So you can't just take the science from one molecule and apply it to the other. And the ketone salt companies have been doing that for five years.

So to clarify, if I've got my ketones elevated, let's say to one millimolar. What you're saying is that the cellular utilization of a strategy of elevating ketones with, let's say, the beta hydroxybutyrate R13 butane dial K ketone ester, that's going to be utilized differently by the mitochondria.

Yeah, sorry.

You said that, right?

Yeah. D beta hydroxybutyrate, R1.

But that's going to be utilized differently at a cellular energy level than using the same strategy to get to 1 millimolar using just say R13 butane dial or.

Or C8. C8 is a better example because 80% of the C8 MCT oil, you know, creates this negative effect. And he kind of explained it also with like nad, NADPH ratios. So if you're on an elevator and the elevator goes up three floors and then you jump, you're not three stories high plus six inches. So it's about that delta. So we can only measure how far the elevator has gone up the 1 millimolar. But we don't really have that. We can't test for that ratio. So that's why he said that the C8 will never work. Now, as far as the R13 butane dial, it doesn't necessarily have that effect. It just happens to have this intoxicating, relaxing effect. So you can call it sports performance because you have enough marketing. And you can cite all these papers that are not one three butane dial. There's actually two papers where they actually used one three butane dial, albeit the racemic form. And they gave it to professional cyclists. Both of them showed a decrease in performance. It was worse, really, for performance. And the side effect was nausea, lightheadedness, euphoria. Sound familiar? Alcohol. They were drunk. And this company is recommending people take one to three servings and then get on a bicycle and trying to go down a French Alps at 70 mph while having the equivalent of what we're giving. You know, we're saying maxing out at three of these. They're saying to do that, I think it's highly dangerous. I think someone's going to get hurt. And I'd like to disclose that it's, you know, a ketogenic alcohol alcohol alternative. But really explain the molecule. They make no reference to alcohol. They say it's more like sugar alcohol. Your kids have sugar alcohol in their candy. Erythritol. That's not getting anyone drunk. No, no, no. Okay. So I think it's misleading. That's marketing.

So the summary for people in case folks heads are spinning on it from a scientific standpoint, it sounds to me like what you're saying is ketone salts, and especially the racemic version of ketone salts, if you're using those as a strategy for performance or appetization, satiation or whatever, the amount of salt that you have to consume as A delivery mechanism for those ketones is gonna negate most of the benefits that you'd be getting from the ketones themselves. Furthermore, if you're looking for something for performance enhancement and for cognitive enhancement, you should be consuming the ester form, the R13 butanediol combined with the beta hydroxybutyrate. If you're looking at a label, that should be the form that you'd use for performance, appetite satiation, daytime use, et cetera. And then finally, if you want that relaxation effect from ketones, that alcohol stimulating effect, that's when you'd look for the R13 butane dial by itself.

Yeah.

Okay. So people only listen like 60 seconds of this whole podcast. That's kind of like the summary of how to use the ketones properly.

Yeah. And we have found that people can take micro doses. So we've had people, professional riders, that will do five hours of cycling and they'll not have breakfast and they'll take one to two capfuls every hour and they can go five hours at whatever their crazy high watts are sustain that.

And the coaches of the ketone ester.

Of the ketone ester. So small amounts. So you might say, oh, well, why can't you take small amounts of the salt? It just doesn't work the same way. And this is part of the Dr. Beach saying that it's the NADPH ratio, It's just more clean. It just goes straight to energy without all the negative effects. And they're able to do five hours of cycling. And at the end, they said that they weren't hungry. They're like, should I eat dinner? I'm like, I think you should, because you're going to melt after seven days at altitude camp without eating. So they can ride for seven hours empty stomach. And he's like, mathematically, this should not work. The calories in the bottle should be burned up in five minutes. What's going on? And the theory is that it's actually. It might be triggering endogenous production. Now, not to be confused with sitting on the couch drinking ketones. It does not burn fat for you. We don't even like to use the phrase gets you into ketosis, because that's misleading, because I think gets you into ketosis makes people think that it's fat burning. No, it skips fat burning and puts ketones in your blood. And yes, you can prick your finger and test for ketones and you'll have ketones. But some scientists will call that ketosis. But I don't really think that's Ketosis. Ketosis is burning your own fat. But in a cycling context, we think that it's kind of triggering this fight or flight mode of, you know, that humans are used to giving it a little bit of ketones. It increases fat burning so that they have whatever calories that they need for that five hours, because like I said, mathematically the 10 calories will be burned up right away. And then the benefit of these fasted rides is they're not sore the next day. So their HRV reading is much better than the next day. So the glucose is drastically harmful.

And one paper, just because you're engaged in less glycolysis, less hydrogen iodine production.

Low elasticity and inflammation and glucose converts to will give you lactic acid. Ketones create zero lactic acid, so there's no lactic acid buildup. And then there's. There's one. Most of the scientific trials, which I don't necessarily like, the protocols that give huge amounts. They did the dual fuel, which happened to work for you, but the dual fuel, and they give it to them, fed and then they're scratching their head saying, hey, this isn't, you know, working. What they're missing out on is that the glucose is. Even though people say carbs are king, that might be doing more harm than good. And there's a clinical trial coming out soon where they showed increase in energy by using just the ketones versus ketones plus glucose. That'll be groundbreaking. Where everyone thought you had to have both of them because it sounds sexy, dual fuel. But they found that when they just had the ketones, they were able to analyze the breath and energy consumption. They were creating more energy. So in 10 years, I would love to find some protocols where you're not using glucose or you're just using a slow carbohydrate like in the snake water, and you're not using that. Harmful effects of sugar.

Yeah, slow carbohydrate maltulose is one that you said. Allulose is another. I think that you can overdo it. I had a friend and I would only say this if he already said it publicly. Podcaster Mark Bell, who was training for a marathon and he took a whole bunch of a slow release carbohydrate. I think he was using Superstarch, combined it with a high dose of ketones and experienced hyperglycemia because apparently what occurred was that there was an insulin desensitization that occurred and this starch resistant carbohydrate flooded his bloodstream with extra glucose. His glucose up into 300. So as with anything, you can overdo it. Now, this was one of those high molecular weight resistant starches. It wasn't like maltulose or allulose. I think that the idea that you just presented of combining ketone esters with trace amounts of a low glycemic carbohydrate that isn't a resistant starch. And I realize we're getting deep into the chemistry here, but like allulose, maltulose, et cetera, I like that as a pretty good strategy. Like you've done with the snake water stuff.

Right.

And so I think that's perfect for performance.

Yeah, we use isomaltilose is what we use a slow carbohydrate, but we only put in 5 grams. So these companies that sell isomaltilose by itself, they'll recommend one serving, be 30 grams, and then people will then double that. So they're at 60. So it's just a tiny, tiny amount that the goal is to keep you in that fat burning mode without dropping your blood sugar too much. And then you have endless calories with what you're running with now. You should never use this stuff on game day. Because we've had people drop out of the race because they used it wrong or they added apple variable. Like, they work out fasted great and it was perfect. And then they added an apple before their race. I'm like, why'd you do that? And they're like, oh, I felt horrible. I'm like, yes, you have to really get it down in practice before taking it to game day.

Yeah. Sage advice. Never try anything new before a competition. Explosive diarrhea and the like may result. So obviously, if people are listening, I would recommend if you want to try this stuff, get the sparkling ketone water. Try a few different flavors of the ketone alcohol, like the gin and tonic, the Moscow mule, the pina colada. I'm not much of a beer guy, but this does taste just like beer. So if you're a beer person, you should check it out. Try a little bit of the snake water. Maybe throw in some of the KE4. I do have a free shipping.

We have a sampler pack now. Yeah. We put it all together to get one of each can sweet and then one of each concentrate.

That's perfect. And you guys gave me a free shipping code. I think it's just Ben. I'll put a link. It's like BenGreenfieldLife.com ketoneaid and then free shipping is just the code. Ben and I also understand that you might have a lot of questions about this stuff, so you can also go to BenGreenfieldLife.com ketopodcast BenGreenfieldLife.com K E T O Podcast Leave your questions there and either Frank or I will be happy to reply. Frank, I've been excited for this episode for the past couple of months just because every time I've been drinking this, I'm like, more people need to know there are options out there besides rum and gin and whiskey and vodka and wine and beer. So it's really cool and I'm excited to get the word out about this. So thank you so much for coming on, for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with us and for creating these, these, these keto hauls.

Thank you.

Awesome. All right, folks, well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Frank Yosa signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com again, the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com ketonepodcast Frank's website you can get to at BenGreenfieldLife.com KetoneAid where you can use the free shipping code Ben and get yourself some goodies. All right folks, have an amazing week. More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield life episode. Say something nice.

Thanks so much.

Means a lot.