Elixir fuels interest in keto craze
Beverage triggers body to consume its own fats
“Funky,” is how HVMN (pronounced human) CEO and co-founder Geoffrey Woo generously describes the taste of his company’s new sports drink — a pocketsized, 25-gram beverage that, within 30 minutes, purportedly gets the body into a level of ketosis that would normally take days of fasting to achieve.
“Keto” diets are all the rage, quadrupling in Google searches in the U.S. in the last year. Diets that are ketogenic are ultra-low in carbs and high in fat. When the body can’t get enough fuel from carbs, the liver forms another fuel — ketones — from the body’s fat stores. It’s one way the human body copes when you’re starving.
Now, Woo’s Silicon Valleybased company has commercialized “the world’s first ketone ester drink” — a notinexpensive elixir that, in a recently published study by some of its inventors (who stand to profit from the product) lowered blood levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin, along with the desire to eat.
The drink — which tastes, according to one reviewer, “very, very extremely bad” — is 98-per-cent ketones, plus water. No salt, fat or carbohydrates.
“At that unique level of purity,” the company claims on its website, “it quickly and effectively delivers the optimal ketone levels for accelerated athletic performance.”
In one 30-minute time trial published in Cell Metabolism last year involving 39 cyclists, those who swallowed the ketone drink went an average 400 metres further (roughly two per cent) than those who consumed a drink high in carbs or fat.
The FDA classifies HVMN Ketone as a food. A threebottle package will cost $US99 when it becomes commercially available in the U.S. early in 2018. (Woo hopes to expand to Canada, which is already among HVMN’s biggest markets for its chewable caffeine gummies.) While it’s being marketed as a sports drink to “serious athletes,” Woo said it could also augment fasting or a ketosis diet — among the most extreme of the lowcarb plans.
Keto diets restrict carbs to as low as five per cent of total calories (no grains, cereals, fruits or sugars.) Dietitians say its exceedingly hard to stick with, encourages the consumption of unhealthy foods (fatty, salty and processed) and, in the early days, can cause “keto flu” — bad breath, brain fog, sugar cravings, crankiness and dizziness, among other symptoms.
According to Woo (who fasts 18 hours a day), HVMN’s ketone ester delivers “seven to 10 days’ worth of a fasting amount of ketones in a consumable form.”
Others aren’t so convinced. “Everyone wants simple answers,” Dr. Louise Burke, of the Australian Institute of Sport told the New York Times.
In a study involving 10 elite male cyclists published in October in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, Burke and her colleagues found riders performed worse after drinking a ketone supplement — an outcome that appeared due to “gut discomfort.” One cyclist dropped out after the warmup because of “prolonged vomiting and dizziness.”
Woo said the Australians tested a different ketone compound.
The ketone ester in HVMN’s beverage is betahydroxybutyrate (BHB), one of three ketone compounds the body naturally produces during a fast or a period of starvation. It was developed with a US$10-million military grant awarded during the Iraq War, when a call was put out to develop a food stuff “to enhance war fighter performance on cognitively and physically demanding missions,” said Woo. The product was developed after a decade of collaboration with Oxford University and National Institutes of Health scientists.
According to HVMN, its ketone drink is a “win-win” super fuel that allows athletes to be both carb- and ketone-loaded. But, in addition to improved aerobic endurance, hints of other potential benefits have been emerging, Woo said.
A small study involving 15 normal-weight volunteers published in November in the journal Obesity found that people who drank the ketone ester reported feeling less hungry, two to four hours post-drink, compared to those who consumed a dextrose drink.
The gut hormone ghrelin also remained suppressed longer.
“While we don’t make explicit claims around turning your body into fat-burning machines,” Woo said, “we have shown it reduces ghrelin, so it likely reduces appetite.”
Another study published last year showed that rats fed a ketone ester diet for five days ran 32-per-cent further on a treadmill, and completed a maze 38-per-cent faster (and with fewer mistakes) than rats fed chow that was equal parts carb, fats and protein.
But humans aren’t rodents living in controlled environments, and experts say diets that throw out entire categories of food can be nearly impossible to comply with over the long term.
Still, the keto diet was among the top mostsearched diets in 2017 in Canada, according to Google, prompting Canadian
WE HAVE SHOWN IT REDUCES GHRELIN, SO IT LIKELY REDUCES APPETITE.
physician Aric Sudicky to tweet, “Keto hype-train officially surpassed gluten-free hype-train in Canadian Google search frequency.
“Which train crashes first?”
Sudicky, who has a special interest in lifestyle medicine, said the study assessing HVMN’s drink on appetite was small (15 people) and lasted only four hours. “Is this even clinically relevant? Did it lead to the subjects actually eating less food? Did it have an impact on their health, their body composition? The things that matter in the real world weren’t measured here.”
Sudicky isn’t anti-keto. “But it’s being hyped as the ‘best diet.’ ” Large reviews have shown strong associations between whole grains and a lower risk of overall death, he said. “The biggest question to ask yourself is, which diet could I happily do, forever?”