#217 Ketosis and Exercise Recovery - Geoffrey Woo from HVMN

Geoffrey Woo (0:00)

Being in ketosis, being low carb is great for adaptation, which means it's like you're training and building up adaptation, but it's not necessarily optimal for performance day.

Siim Land (0:13)

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Geoffrey Woo (1:20)

All in all, I cannot complain.

I think I've been able to take a silver lining from it, which is that essentially we've had a forced autophagy of our social calendar because of pandemic. So in that way, I think it's been very fun and refreshing to be able to reset my calendar, to take control in a way that would have been very easy to autopilot from 2019 to 2020

Siim Land (1:51)

Yeah, I'm glad that you have made this realization and you're so right that you can always find some positive things out of everything. And I think more than that, we may need more of this cleansing a little bit when it comes to our responsibilities or projects or even just our routines. So you can definitely find some good opportunities to kind of hack away some of the things that you don't need and to kind of tighten things up, especially if you were to use the same analogy of autophagy.

Yeah, I was going to ask, a lot of people were more interested in improving their metabolic health to strengthen the immune system, but you specialize in performance with ketones. So has there been any interest for these ketones, especially in Geoff's optimizing performance?

Geoffrey Woo (2:47)

Yeah, I would say that the original research stream was focused both on performance, but also on the medical and therapeutic implications. I think that if you look at the history of the researchers dating back to George Cahill, who did a lot of the early fasting studies and seeing that ketones were an important fuel substrate during these 40-day or 360-day plus fasts, and then Richard Reach at the NIH looking at some of the preferential redox ratios in terms of how the coenzymes in the PrEP cycle favors being in ketosis versus glycolysis or beta oxidation. I think there's always been this duality of enhanced performance and therapeutic benefit, right? And I think that's kind of an interesting lens from a biohacker's perspective, is that I think usually on the biohacking performance side, we take normal people or fit people trying to enhance them. But medicine is essentially bringing people from deficient states to normal states. But I would say that it's the same vector or same direction of effort. So in that sense, it's just the same effort, but from a different starting position.

So within the performance space and ketones, I would say a lot of the research over the last year has been focused on recovery and also fine tuning protocols in which exogenous ketones actually are most beneficial. I would say that one of the top research group looking at sports physiology and exogenous ketones today is being run out of Belgium.

Professor Peter Hezboll at KU Levant is doing just phenomenal work. And he's published a series of papers showing both additional work on recovery, but also super fascinating data on how to best stack other supplements or other interventions on top of exogenous ketones. So one of the recent papers I thought was very, very interesting was realizing that such a big bolus of ketones actually drops your blood pH, right? Ketones, beta hydroxybutyric acid is actually an acid. So if you have a lot of ketones all at once and you don't have enough buffer or sodium bicarbonate that you're that you're that you know that different organs kind of buffer, you can actually lower the pH and that actually inhibits performance, right? Like being in an acidotic state is is is like is like kind of equivalent to having so much lactic acid production that you have acidity in your blood. So a very similar thing can happen with ketosis. Lactate and ketones have, I think, a very interesting parallel in terms of how they interact both in physiology as well as the historical kind of the timeline and how we have been doing. Better understood both lactate and ketones.