Can ketone be the new fuel for humans?

The nutrition label on a shot-sized bottle of this clear, odourless liquid defies traditional explanation. It contains 120 calories — roughly the equivalent of a hearty slice of bread — yet it has no fat, no protein, and no carbohydrates.

Those calories instead come from ketones, an ingredient that a scientist likes to call "the fourth macronutrient".

"It's not a fat, it's not a protein, it's not a carb, but your body gets fuel from it," he told.

With that in mind, he launched his company's first ketone product.

The drink, now available for pre-order, promises improved athletic ability, energy, and a heightened sense of focus.

Could boost performance 'unlike anything we've ever seen'
Most of the food we eat contains carbs, from fruits and starchy vegetables to potatoes and pasta.

In fruit, carbs come from naturally-occurring sugars; in potatoes, veggies, and pasta, they come from starch. They're all ultimately broken down into sugar, or glucose, for energy.

When robbed of carbs, the body turns to fat for fuel.

In the process of digging into its fat stores, the body releases molecules called ketones. A high-fat, low-carb diet (also known as a ketogenic diet) is a shortcut to the same goal.

Instead of going without food, someone on the diet tricks the body into believing it is starving by snatching away carbohydrates, its primary source of fuel.

This is why, as long as you're not eating carbs, you can ramp up your intake of fatty foods like butter, steak, and cheese — and still lose weight. The body becomes a fat-melting machine, churning out ketones in its drive to keep running.

If you could ingest those ketones directly, rather than starving yourself or turning to a keto diet, you could essentially get a super-power.

"You could run up a wall, but you don't want to," is how a lead researcher at HVMN and a postgraduate student  put it.

In studies with athletes, it appears that combining ketones and carbs produces what scientist called a "stacking effect".

That performance boost is "unlike anything we've ever seen before", said  a professor biochemistry  and the scientist leading the charge to translate her work on ketones and human performance into HVMN Ketone.

An energy drink that goes far beyond caffeine

In a small study he gave an early version of HVMN's ketone drink to a group of elite cyclists (some of whom were former Olympians) and compared how they performed on a 30-minute cycling exercise to two other groups who were either given either a carb-rich drink or a fat-rich drink.

The high-performing cyclists on the ketone drink went an average of 400 meters further than the best performers who'd had the carb or fat drink. It is likely that they didn't even feel a difference, he said.

"It's not like caffeine or anything, it's not a stimulant,"he said. 

"If you're not watching what you're doing, you think, 'Oh I'm doing alright, everything feels normal,' but then you look down and all of a sudden you see, 'Oh, wow, I've gone a lot further than usual!' 

You'll find on a rowing machine, for example, you're going a lot faster and you didn't even realise it."
A bottle of HVMN Ketone delivers 25 grams of beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), one of the substances the body naturally produces during a fast or a period of starvation.

Within an hour of consuming it, the drink can raise ketone levels to a level similar to what you would see after at least seven days of fasting, he said.

That's based on studies,  in which adults were given drinks containing either ketone ester or ketone salts, a supplement that combines ketones and sodium.

When reporters tried it out for themselves , they used meters to measure our blood glucose and ketone levels before and after drinking it.

To our surprise, we saw immediate and measurable results.

During the hour before and the hour after we drank the ester, on of their ketone levels rose from 1.2 mmol/l to 4.2 mmol/l. the other's ketone levels rose from 0.6 mmol/l, a low-level state of ketosis, to 6.0 mmol/l, a deep state of ketosis that can typically only be achieved through fasting.

Most people maintain a non-existent level of ketosis of 0.1 mmol/l, but we started with higher levels because one of us happened to be trying a fast while the other was eating a low-carb diet.

But did those shifts in numbers reflect a difference in performance? It's hard to say.

Two people do not make for a sufficient sample size in a study of the drink's effects, and it's impossible to separate our perception from any placebo effect.

Still, both of us noticed some improvement in focus, and we both skipped our usual 3pm coffee — a change we didn't notice until hours later.

"[Ketone] sort of like makes life easy," he said.

"Rather than making you feel as though your heart is racing or you're exhausted … you have this energy. Energy you just don't normally have."

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