#192 Dr Dominic D’Agostino on Using Ketosis for High Stress Environments

Dominic D'Agostino (0:00)

Healthy mitochondria are really sort of like the ultimate tumor suppressor. And one way to ensure that your mitochondria are robust and healthy is to rely more on fat metabolism and ketone metabolism, and not so much on sugar, inefficient sugar metabolism.

Siim Land (0:21)

Body, mind, empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:23)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:29)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:30)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:34)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Dr. Dominic D'Agostino. Dr. Dom has a PhD in Neuroscience and Physiology. He's a professor at the University of Florida and is considered one of the world's top experts in ketosis, ketogenic diets, fasting and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

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Dominic D'Agostino (1:19)

Thank you for having me Siim.

Siim Land (1:21)

Yeah, I'm really glad to talk with you and like you were one of my first, let's say these experts that I started following in terms of ketosis and the ketogenic diet. So yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you.

Dominic D'Agostino (1:35)

Great. Well, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Siim Land (1:37)

Yeah.

And you are like many people would consider you like the world's leading expert on ketosis and keto. So how did you get into it and what got you like interested?

Dominic D'Agostino (1:50)

Yeah. Well, I was trained in neuroscience and like I guess what I would call like fundamental basic science research. And I did patch clamp electrophysiology where I measure electrical recordings in the brain over time. And I did that for my PhD research, which then led to research on seizures. And with a particular focus on military applications associated with the special operations community, the Navy SEALs, they use a closed-circuit rebreather when they do their dive operations. And a limitation of their dive safety and performance would be oxygen toxicity seizures.

So, I was mostly focused on looking for a drug and looking for different antioxidant cocktails that could prevent the reactive oxygen species that would be elevated in the brain that was thought to be contributing to these seizures. But when we studied cellular preparations and also brain size preparations, it became apparent to me that it was a dysregulation of metabolic homeostasis that was contributing to excess electrical excitability, in particular, an excess release of glutamate, which would cause hyper excitability and then a seizure. But it was really the maintenance of the energy status, the ATP, that was failing. So, I started looking into things like lactate and even creatine and other metabolites, but ketones got put on to my radar. And then I discovered, although I trained in nutrition science as an undergrad, I didn't really appreciate the anti-seizure neuroprotective effects of the ketogenic diet. So, I guess around 2007 or 2008, I became interested in using the ketogenic diet for this application of research, which was oxygen toxicity seizures.

And then it all started from there. So, I actually was really amazed at how much, you know, basic science research and clinical research there was on a ketogenic diet for a clinical, it was basically, you know, a certified clinical therapy for drug-resistant epilepsy and other drug-resistant seizures.

So, it kind of fit perfectly with what I was proposing, which was to put a warfighter into a ketogenic state to make them more resilient against the extreme environment of high oxygen toxicity. And in addition to protecting their brain, I became also interested in the performance applications of the ketogenic diet and ultimately exogenous ketone supplementation, which we have a pretty active, very active research program on.

Siim Land (4:50)

Yeah, that's really fascinating.

And it's really interesting that you kind of stumbled upon almost on this very simple and very like intrinsic part of the human metabolism, such as ketosis. Like it's we've evolved to be in ketosis like a lot of the time, and it's also like very natural for us to go into whenever we are like fasting or whenever like restricting carbohydrates. So it's like a very powerful state and it's like very simplistic and seems to be very effective for like this very related issues that you talked about like oxygen toxicity and just general like high stress, neuronal stress.